iii a cold War
kurtis Sunday
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Anarchy in a Cold War first appeared in a very limited Hooligan Press
draft edition in the late 1980s. Shortly afterwards Hooligan Press, an
anarcho-punk DIY publishing group, went the way of all flesh and
dematerialised. In addition to non-fiction, Hooligan Press published
several novels: Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect, Down Wind of Eden and
The Free ; as well as the anarcho-satirical comic, The Faction File, and a
collection of short stories, From Beneath the Keyboard, described by
one reviewer as varying from ‘the excellent to the rather
embarrassing’. Hooligan Press also published a history of squatting
in West Berlin, imaginatively titled Squatting in West Berlin. Most of
the above titles are still available from various sources, and some
have been translated into other languages. Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl
Effect has recently been republished as an ebook. An internet search
will reveal more.
Anarchy in a Cold War
Kurtis Sunday
Copyright © 2012 Kurtis Sunday
Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license granted, 2016.
Permission granted to copy and distribute this digital edition in
current unmodified PDF format and to print copies from this PDF
for non-commercial purposes.
Print edition published by Cambria Books, Wales 2012
Print edition ISBN: 978-0-9572459-5-2
LLYFRAU
CAMBRIA
Cover photo: Tom Chektout
Back inset illustration: Kreu^berg Cafe, Berlin by Klara Meinhardt
Cover design: Cyberium, www.cyberium.co.uk
Special thanks to Fehlfarben and Crass for permission to quote their
lyrics, either in the original or translated.
Hooligan Vintage
Print edition available from
www.cambriabooks.co.uk,
other internet sources, bookshops
or at anarchy_in_a_cold_war@gmx.net.
This book is dedicated to all those
who made it possible.
There is no need to name them.
They know who they are.
All characters in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblances to persons living
or dead are inevitable.
Minimal poetic licence has been taken
with historical events.
Central Europe, 1981
West Berlin was a West German enclave within East
Germany. The city, like Germany itself, was divided
into four sectors after the Second World War. The
American, British and French sectors became West
Berlin, while the Russian sector became East Berlin.
The Berlin Wall surrounded the American, British and
French Sectors. Legally, the four victorious powers
were the sovereign authorities in the city until
German reunification.
Poland
Planet Earth (already pretty fucked up), 1981
WEST BERLIN. Sun. Blue sky. As if spring's already
arrived. Saturday afternoon. People are gathering. Have
been for an hour, crowding round the intersection of
Mehringdamn, Yorck- and GneisenaustraBe, blocking the
traffic flow on the broad avenues, impatient to move, for
the signal from the loudspeaker van. Nothing worse than
standing around waiting for a demo to kick off.
Long hair, short hair, Punks, black leather jackets, safety
pins, lilac dungarees, Palestinian scarves, striped drainpipe
trousers, blue jeans, parkas, yellow wind breakers,
multicoloured jumpers, painted faces, clown noses, black
ski masks. Women and men with babies Amerindian style
on their backs or chests, SEW (hardcore Commies),
Alternative Liste, Young Socialists, photographers, the
Gewerkschaft fur Wissenschaft und Erzeihung (trade
union), cyclists, musicians, beards, woolly caps, Mohicans,
the Marxistische Gruppe (fluffy Commies) distributing
leaflets, a Jesus-lookalike in long white robes, hennaed
hair, Helga Goetze with her multicoloured sandwich
board advocating sexual liberation. Toddlers, a video
camera crew, gym shoes, a juggler tossing rainbow balls,
kebabs, anti-nuke badges, Dmitri and his bottle of
SchultheiB 1 , Turks with leaflets about their people on
1 Schultheili beer, particular to Berlin. The SchultheiB
man - a later medieval respectable citizen type - is
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
hunger strike in Munich, groups, loners, lovers, nearly
everyone wearing some sort of symbolic and sometimes
very practical scarf.
A lot of people, ten thousand perhaps. Maybe more. And
others are sure to join along the route. Multiply the official
figure the police will give afterwards by two: that might
give some sort of idea of how many there really are.
And down the back streets and almost out of view: the
Bullen . 2 Paramilitary olive-green uniforms, perspex
shields, white helmets, new-model green-white and old-
model navy blue police transits parked in rows, young
closely shaved faces under clipped-up plastic visors, black
boots and black batons being played with casually. And
here and there the peaked cap of authority.
Some Punks, bottles of SchultheiB in hand, have climbed
onto the roof of the mobile ImbiB, which is doing a brisk
trade in fried sausages soaked in curried Ketchup and salty
pommes frites . 3
An incomprehensible crackly voice suddenly booms from
the loudspeaker van. People turn to each other. Are they
starting? No. Not yet. It's something about having to hang
around for another five minutes and would people please
let the loudspeaker van through to the front.
one, two, three...
The chant starts somewhere and is immediately taken up:
on advertising billboards all around the city.
2 Bullen - bulls - German for police, not particular
derogatory, English equivalent would be 'cops'.
3 ImbiB - kiosk, in this case a mobile van selling
mainly curried sausages, small hamburger-like
balls of meat called Bouletten, pommes frites
(chips topped with either tomato sauce or
mayonnaise), potato salad, beer and coffee. In
parts of the city there is one on nearly every
street corner.
2
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
free the prisoners!
That’s the signal. A cheer spreads through the crowd.
The voice on the loudspeaker takes up the chant.
The crowd roars louder.
free the prisoners!
Out of sight, the Bullen, the representatives of those for
whom the chant is meant, silently begin their preparations.
The music starts: the familiar desperate beat of
Fehlfarben.
history is being made
es geht voran! 4
The sound pulsates through the crowd. Bodies vibrate.
Heads and feet beat it out. Some dance.
space labs are falling on islands
forgetfulness is spreading
es geht voran!
The vanguard starts pushing the loudspeaker van towards
YorckstraBe.
People follow it. Faces light up.
mountains are exploding
the presiden t is guilty
The Punks on top of the ImbiB cheer.
Dmitri takes a slug from his bottle of SchultheiB.
es gehtvoran!
Black flags, red flags, yellow flags, lilac flags flutter in
the February wind. The banners rise. Banners with
paintings on them, the red banners of the SEW with their
yellow socialist-realist block lettering, and a banner the
width of the street at the front announcing that that The
4 es geht voran - things are moving (ahead),
approximately.
3
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Berlin Mob is on the move.
grey b-film heroes
are about to rule the world
es geht voran!
es gehtvoran!
history is being made
es geht voran!
The trees on both sides and in the middle of YorckstraBe
are winter bare. A guy playing a full-sized Orange Order
drum strapped across his beer belly dances through the
crowd.
Two women, squatter and feminist symbols finger-
painted onto their whitened cheeks, are holding up a
banner: Wenn Bullen prtigeln, kriegen Steine FltigelP
Cobblestones with wings fly in and out of the Punky red
and black lettering.
People hang from lamp-posts and perch on pedestrian
barriers trying to get a better view. Cameras click, catching
the colour and music in silent black and white. There are
still people at the back who haven't started moving yet.
The police transit leading the demonstration, a safe
distance ahead of it, approaches the railway bridges that
crisscross the avenue. Just before it passes under the first
bridge the people pushing the loudspeaker van break into a
trot, and start gaining on the transit. But after a warning to
the driver from the helmeted Bulle riding shotgun at the
open back doors, the transit accelerates and regains the gap
lost in seconds.
Stage one accomplished.
The first row of demonstrators have stopped, are waiting
for the gap between them and the loudspeaker van to widen
again.
5 Translation: when cops apply undue force,
cobblestones grow wings - or something like that.
4
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
There's a moment of silent tension - despite the music.
Then suddenly there's a roar and the demonstrators charge.
Wild screams of joy echo and amplify into a barrage under
the cast-iron bridges. The demonstrators catch up with the
loudspeaker van and stop.
But behind them another gap has opened. And another
human wave waits. Then it too roars and charges under the
bridges.
This happens again and again, waves of demonstrators
ritually throwing themselves forward, screaming, running,
proclaiming animal joy. The street is theirs now.
The anti-socials attack the walls with spray cans:
be realistic, demand the impossible
power to the imagination
no power for nobody
legal - illegal - scheiBegal 6
we are the people our parents warned us about
kein gott! kein staat! kein vaterland ! 7
A theatre group who look conspicuous, pretending to look
inconspicuous, in the beloved trench coats, trilbies and dark
glasses of secret policemen everywhere, huddles together
beside a traffic light. The women have painted marker-
black moustaches on their upper lips. One has a camera,
another a pair of binoculars. The other three leer through
holes in the newspapers they are supposed to be reading.
Cheers and fake jeers are hurled at them from the crowd. A
comic-book 'terrorist', in black hat and black cape, suddenly
appears and runs screaming at them. He has something in
his hand. He throws it at them. But the black sponge-cum-
cobblestone yoyos back to him on its string and he smiles
6 Pretty much means 'legal, illegal, we don't
give a shit'
7 no god! no state! no fatherland!
5
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
and bows to the crowd for his applause.
The first of the squatted houses comes into sight. Banners
hang from its balconies. The facade at street level has been
given a quick coat of pink and blue paint and graffitied. At
two upper-storey windows large speakers blare out the
delicious sound of The Clash. London Calling. The
squatters on the balconies make clenched-fist salutes and
wave a large black flag.
"GolzstraBe 30!" the loudspeaker van announces.
The crowd cheers.
Then suddenly, more angry electric guitars and raging
drums. It's Crass.
they've got a bomb, they've got a bomb
twenty odd years ... waiting for the flash...
There are some new apartment blocks on the other side of
the street. People watch from their balconies, like spectators
at a circus.
... four minute warning ...
The demo turns into Potsdamer StraBe. The music is now
Latin American. Last year Nicaragua was liberated. In El
Salvador, Guatemala, Chile the fight goes on. The sound of
the pan flutes is haunting. One can almost smell the pure
air of the Andes and sense the spirit of the Incan panther.
Out of sight and out of mind the Bullen follow the
parade, shrink-wrapped in their sense of duty and
preparedness.
Here there are other spectators. A few prozis on day shift
- this is their manor. 8 Turkish men outside kebab
takeaways and Turkish cafes, good humoured
bewilderment on their Southern Gastarbeiter faces. 9 People
Prozis - prostitutes.
9 Gastarbeiter - migrant worker, literally 'guest
worker'.
6
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
drop into the Turkish places to empty their bladders. There
might be trouble if they went into German ones. In the side
streets traffic police direct traffic away, alone and in white
coats they enjoy non-combatant status.
The Sanis, the demonstrators' Red Cross, are spread
among the crowd. The red crosses, cumulating in clenched
fists, on their helmets, bags and armbands are reminders of
what can happen. But the buzz is too good to worry about
that now. It's more like a carnival than a demonstration.
Even some of the people looking down from their windows
along the route seem to be enjoying it. Every now and then
individuals from the crowd shout up and ask them to come
down and join in. Most remain stone-faced, bewildered and
weary - but some wave. Now and again there are bangs and
puffs of smoke. The remnants of New Year's Eve fire¬
crackers. They leave an ominous whiff of gunpowder in
the February air.
Some of the old hotels on Potsdamer Strade - upper-class
brothels during the Kaiserzeit - have been turned into
hostels for Third World asylum seekers. 10 Lots of Tamils
these days. They stand in groups at the windows of the four
storey buildings, their brown faces smiling, some waving,
some brandishing clenched fists.
The crowd takes up an old war cry.
long-live-inter-national-solid-arity!
And on it goes, the mass of colour moving to the music,
winding its way through the streets, filling them, slogans
and repetitive beats echoing up between the houses. A beer-
sodden ur-mensch at a balcony shakes his fist and screams
10 Kaiserzeit - the time of the Kaisers, the last
German Emperor abdicated in 1918.
7
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
a primal scream down at the mob. 11
After they pass U-Bahn Kleistpark underground train
station the stopping and charging starts off again.
es gehtvoran!
The demo passes a peepshow. A group of women, their
scarves now suddenly masks, start digging up cobblestones
from the pavement with keys. Seconds later - amid the
clowns and painted faces and es-geht-voran - there's the
sudden clatter of the peepshow's blacked-out front window
being smashed. The crowd cheers. A white-coated traffic
policeman opposite sees it. But his job is directing traffic. A
brass band reaches the spot, stops and plays a tune amid the
shards of broken glass.
Further back another van is being pushed along. On top
of it, in a wooden cage, a building speculator in top hat and
tails rages at the mob and bemused onlookers. The music
plays on. The Clash again. The Guns ofBrixton.
Elsewhere the 'terrorist' is at work again. He homes in on
a respectable looking middle-aged couple on the pavement
and runs raving at them, looking like a revolutionary ghoul
straight from the pages of a Springer Press rag. He throws
the cobblestone. They laugh when it turns into a sponge.
Relieved.
Down Martin-Luthcr-Strade and onto John-F-Kennedy-
Platz to Rathaus Schoneberg, the seat of the Senate, the
city government, the destination. A pedestrian barrier has
been erected in front of the nondescript town hall. A few
Bullen in riot gear patrol behind it. A TV crew moves
freely among them. But reinforcements are not far away.
Rows of transits line the two narrow streets at the sides of
11 ur-mensch, from the German 'Urmensch', meaning
original (Ur) human (Mensch), cave-man type.
8
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
the building.
From a top window of the Rathaus a figure points a
tripod-mounted camera down into the crowded square.
Another with binoculars sweeps the mass of faces. The
watchers are not from the television. Orwell-lite.
As the square fills things quiet down. The music from the
loudspeaker van is regularly interrupted to ask people to
move to the other end and make room for those still
arriving down Martin-Luthcr-Strade. There is a distinct
feeling of what now?
A half-hearted attempt is made to move the barrier back
but a group of Bullen casually steps forward and just
moves it back into place again, meeting no more resistance
than a long loud roar from the crowd. But, off to the side,
some hardcores are being more resolute about moving the
barriers. The large wooden fake medieval doors of the
Rathaus open and two files of Bullen in full riot gear pour
out and immediately take up positions all along the front of
the building. More boos and catcalls. More people crowd
onto the already crowded square.
The music is interrupted again. This time to ask people
not to let themselves be provoked. It sounds more than a
bit lame. The brass band plays on.
For a minute or two things cool down.
Then a hardcore lobs a SchultheiB bottle - an empty one.
It hits one of the TV crew behind the barrier. Blood pours
down his face. Two paramedics walk him to an ambulance.
The back doors of the police transits at the side of the
building open in unison and more Bullen pour out. They
line up into marching formation, helmet visors down,
shields and batons at the ready, latter-day legionaries.
Another barrage of boos and catcalls. The latter-day
9
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
legionaries start to march forward towards the barrier.
left right! left right!
The crowd chants derisively, half-jeering, half-defiantly.
left right! left right!
Louder and louder.
The green and white column keeps moving.
It's not clear what it intends to do.
left right! left right!
Unexpectedly two Bullen behind the barrier open it at a
safe spot and let the marching column in to line up in front
of the Rathaus. There's maybe a hundred of them.
The tension dissipates.
The three paint bombs that fly over the heads of the
crowd towards the police ranks are like an afterthought.
Two of them bounce pointlessly on the asphalt, not even
bursting. But the third splatters bright liquid yellow over
one of the olive-green paramilitary uniforms.
The sun is low in the sky now and the February chill is
creeping back. But when the Latin American music starts
up again some of the previous carnival atmosphere returns.
Two woman in a black leather jackets climb onto the roof
of the loudspeaker van. Both have bundles of red leaflets
stating the demands of the demonstration - an amnesty and
an immediate stop to evictions. They begin scattering them
over the heads of the crowd. The wind catches them and
whips them upwards towards the sky. Up and up, fluttering
over the ranks of the Bullen. They begin throwing more.
Another woman climbs onto the van and more and more of
the poppy-red sheets of paper float upwards, filling the air,
up and up, swirling over the clock tower of the Rathaus.
10
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Their defiance of gravity is like an omen, an auspicious
one. The crowd cheers their upward flight towards the
gods. It is the last high moment of it all. Then the speeches
begin.
11
2
A knock at the door.
Our Hero isn't expecting anyone.
It's Heidi from upstairs. Once had a cup of coffee in her
place. Not his type. Too clean living perhaps.
"Do you mind if someone squats the empty apartments in
the front house?" she says.
"Shit! No!"
A few seconds later she's gone.
She had been uncertain as to what his reaction would be.
He really didn't have a clue what kind of an impression he
made. Probably didn't bear thinking about. He puts on his
layers of winter clobber. Walking down to Godot for a
drinking session he barely notices the cold. 12
Tina feels she has to tell someone. She speaks to Antonia.
"I've decided to take a long break from uni," she says.
The kitchen of the shared apartment in Schoneberg is
warm and tidy. Bottles of herbs, sleeves of garlic, jars of
muesli and wholefoods on wooden shelves. Antonia is
making tea.
"I thought you liked it."
"I've had second thoughts."
"Go on."
"I suppose I felt it was all unreal ... academic. Missing a
1 The squatted 'houses' in Berlin were very large
apartment blocks, not like the smaller two-up two-
down houses which were squatted in Britain, mainly in
London, at the time.
12
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
few semesters can hardly do me any harm. But 1 really
want to stop for a while and see what happens.”
Antonia helps herself to some tobacco.
"You don't seem over the moon about it," she says.
"No?"
"Not really."
"Just a bit apprehensive. Being suddenly landed with so
much free time is quite dizzying." She lit her roll-up. "No.
I'm not apprehensive, damn it. 1 want to get involved in
something new, something different."
"Practical politics instead of academic politics?"
"I have been doing practical things with the Tenants
Union. But what is that achieving? In the long run? If there
is a long run! Frustrating meetings. Giving out the paper on
freezing Saturday mornings in front of the market hall. I've
had little or no contact with the people there except at the
most superficial level - my fault maybe. A bit like the uni, I
suppose - a lot of blah blah blah."
Antonia pours the tea.
"I'm going to Brokdorf," Tina says. 13
Kreuzberg is quiet during the Brokdorf anti-nuke demo
weekend. Lots of Szene watering holes are shut. 14 Half the
place seems to have gone to West Germany. It's been in the
news all week. The original banning order had been
overturned but then relegitimised by several courts in quick
succession. The latest report puts the number of
demonstrators at 100,000.
Our Hero and Big Bruno are following developments on
13 Brokdorf - nuclear power station building site in
West Germany.
14 Die Szene - scene, subculture, as in 'die
alternative Szene'.
13
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
the radio. Big Bruno has squatted one of the front
apartments. He's called Big Bruno because he's big. He
takes up space.
Our Hero asks him if he thinks there'll be aggro.
"They'll smash a few heads in - just to remind people that
what they are doing is verboten no matter what the courts
say."
"Bit of a fatalist, are we?"
"No amount of demonstrating is going to stop nuclear
power stations. The pigs will get their way in the end. They
always do."
Later, after Big Bruno has left. Our Hero opens the oven
floor to put in some coal briquettes. The glowing embers
remind him of some lines of a poem by Sylvia Plath.
Something about the beauty of fire, crematoria, and smoke
rising from chimneys over Poland.
He goes back to the draft of the SF story on his cluttered
desk.
Tina rings Antonia from the phone box on Chamissoplatz.
"How was Brokdorf?"
"Wait on a sec, 1 want to light a ciggie."
"I saw the TV. Looked pretty heavy."
"It was chaos. The fucking helicopters were terrifying.
They flew over the crowd, diving down over people's
beads. 1 couldn't believe it was actually happening."
"Were many people hurt?"
"A lot. Some pretty badly - covered in blood. I've never
been so frightened or seen so much ... fear. They beat up
people for no reason at all. For nothing. Except being
there, I suppose."
Tina hears her take a deep pull from her cigarette.
14
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"We had to leave our cars kilometres from the place and
then walk for ages though the snow. On our way to the site
we were meeting people who were coming back from it.
The Bullen checked us but let us through. But there was no
way you could get anywhere near the site itself. Earlier
some people had been talking about occupying it but it was
surrounded by barbed wire, dikes, and crawling with
Border Patrol and Bullen. But the helicopters were the
worst. The noise they make is so fucking horrible. People
were running in all directions to get away from them.
There was one guy there in a wheelchair - he couldn't even
run away. He had courage."
A Turkish couple, the woman in traditional dress, is
waiting outside in the dark.
"Look, I'll have to hang up now, there are people waiting
and it's fucking freezing out here."
"There isn't any solution, or reasonable reason for hope,"
Dread pronounces. They were fairly well on, sitting in
Niemandsland under the white glare of the neon lights. 15
"When the human race allows someone like Ronnie the
Clown to have the power of life and death over the whole
fucking planet, how can there be? You can lob a few
stones, even Molotov cocktails, but don't have any
illusions about making a fuck of a difference."
He notices Horse's glass is empty.
"Same again?”
Horse hands Dread a ten mark note. It’s his turn to go to
the bar.
"It's fantastic up here," Big Bruno shouts.
15 Niemandsland - no man's land.
15
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The early evening sun is spreading its cold light over the
cold blue sky. A sea of roofs stretches to the circular
horizon. The white contrail of a jet etches itself across the
blue. The air is acrid from the grey smoke drifting up from
tens of thousands of chimney stacks.
The others are still clambering up though the skylight.
Familiar landmarks: the slender East Berlin television
tower topped by its revolving silver sphere; the glass and
steel slab of the Springer Press building; the massive grey
Speer-designed main terminal of USAF Tempelhof, the
American military air base; and, down by the market hall,
the redbrick spire of the Passionskirche.
The last of the four of them hands up a bucket of
whitewash, brushes and rollers before getting up herself.
"Well, which way round will we put it?" Joschka asks.
"Does it matter?" says the woman who has come up last.
Three minutes later it's done. A big white
YANKEE GO HOME
alongside an equally large Besetzer 16 symbol:
0
The American pilots of the planes and helicopters that use
Tempelhof will be able to see it. That's the idea.
By March there are over a 100 squatted houses in West
Berlin. The tageszeiting, the independent leftwing daily
16 Squatter.
16
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
usually just called the taz, starts giving the exact figure in a
red box on the top corner of the front page. The number
increases daily.
There's a sign graffitied on the house door:
YOU ARE NOW
LEAVING THE
AMERICAN SECTOR
The bricked-up ground-floor windows have been painted
over. One with a yellow sun giving a clenched fist salute.
The other with a smiling yellow house doing the same. The
background to both is fresh sky blue. Click. Justine
photographs the sign and the paintings.
Rudi rings the bell again. Justine had met him in the
street while out on one of her photographic expeditions.
They know each other slightly from when she and Rainer
used to live together in KopischestraBe. He lives in a
squatted house and asked her back to have a look, take
some photos if she wants to. She's never been inside a
squatted house before.
"Can you give us a few copies when you've developed
them?" he asks as they wait. "We'd l ik e to do a
documentation sometime in the future. Show the state of
the place when we first moved in and the work we've done.
Before and after."
"No problem!”
A long-haired male head pops out the window directly
above them, pops in, then out again and throws them down
the keys.
"Catch!"
Rudi catches the bundle and opens the massive door.
"Muck, our resident hippy!" he explains.
17
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The hallway is dark.
"We're using the ground floor as a store room. With the
windows bricked-up there's not much else we can do with
it. We've talked about making it a darkroom, or even a
cafe."
She follows him up the stairs. The walls are covered in
graffiti and posters.
"This is our common room."
They go in.
"We've torn down the dividing wall to make it into one
big room," he explains. "We haven't gotten around to
painting it yet. One of the ovens is working. The other was
already smashed when we moved in."
Muck is sprawled out in an old armchair smoking,
reading the latest copy of Radikal - a black and white
photo of some American white trash toddlers smashing a
Cadillac is on the cover. He gives them a cursory glance.
Sunlight shines in through four large front windows. Two
worn-out sofas. Cushions strewn around a low table
overflowing with pamphlets, chipped mugs, empty tobacco
packets and an overflowing ashtray. A doorless doorway
leads off to the right.
"This used to be a kitchen," Rudi explains as they go
through it. "We're turning it into a bathroom."
Two bathtubs have already been installed and connected
up. The walls have been painted a watery blue, complete
with Matisse bathers. Justine photographs them. Click.
"We still need to put an oven in - one that will heat water
as well. We've put an ad in the taz for one."
The next room they go into is Heike's, he says. She
senses that he does not entirely approve of Heike. It's in
good condition - and in a mess: mattress, crumpled duvet,
posters and newspaper cuttings pinned haphazardly to the
18
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
pink walls, a rucksack, several plastic bags stuffed with
dirty clothes, tops of tins that serve as ashtrays, empty
wine bottles, books and comics, cassette tapes.
The communal kitchen is across the way. White walls,
bare wood, potted plants and a cast-iron cooking stove.
Freshly painted multicoloured wooden chairs - obviously
done from leftovers - are arranged around a big wooden
table. Pots, pans, cups, plates, jars of rice, beans, pasta and
muesli neatly arrayed on newly built shelves.
There's a single poster above the sink, instantly
recognisable from the hedgehog symbol as being from the
Alternative Liste. Under the black and white photo of
German troops marching through the Arc de Triomphe, the
words: Better our youth occupies empty houses than
other countries!
"I'll take one or two here as well."
Click. Click.
They go up the next flight of stairs.
"We have another kitchen in the back house. But it's a bit
chaotic."
She's getting the feeling that Rudi has definite opinions
about order and chaos.
"From here on it's mainly people's rooms."
Nobody is in. The rooms are in various conditions of
repair and neglect, neatness and mess. Only two are worth
photographing.
One of them is empty except for a stepladder. The floor is
covered with flakes of white paint. Someone has been
working on the ceiling.
"Martin's work," Rudi explains.
Part of the stucco relief has been cleaned. Patches of a
baroque-style mural - or perhaps rococo, she's not quite
sure of the difference - in gaudy colours and gold leaf are
19
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
visible. She aims her camera at it. focuses and presses the
button. Click.
"It's taken him days just to get this far. It was covered
with who knows how many coats of paint. It seems that a
lot of the ceilings in these old houses had murals like this
on them but they were painted over at some point."
"Tastes change."
"Originally the facades on most of the pre-war houses
were all stucco. And on some of the houses that had
survived the bombing it was often deliberately hacked off.
It had gone out of fashion, become unmodern, they said.
Stucco was out, plain was suddenly in. The past was
hidden behind the modernity of the Wirtschaftswunder.
Out of sight. Out of mind ." 17
They continue. The house is a maze of walls removed
and doorways without doors where no doorways had been
before.
"Now we're in the back house," he explains.
He shows her the other kitchen he's mentioned earlier. A
girl of about sixteen with pink hair, wearing black lipstick
and tattered black clothes, is spreading dollops of Aldi
liver sausage onto a slice of brown bread. Rudi ignores her.
They go down more stairs, pass more rooms, another
bathroom. They reach the ground floor.
"This is our workshop. Where our tools are supposed to
be kept. Supposed to be."
There are no windows. A naked bulb hanging from the
ceiling is the only light. A collection of tools hangs on the
wall behind a rough wooden bench over a row of tins filled
with screws and nails. Too dark to photograph. Cold too,
like most of the house.
Wirtschaftswunder - post-war economic miracle.
20
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
They cross the courtyard and return to the warmth of the
kitchen in the front house. It’s no longer empty.
"I've been showing Justine around. Justine. Heike."
"I hope he hasn't been telling you about how we are all
Chaoten," Heike says . 18 "Rudi's worse than that Springer
rag, the BZ , sometimes ." 19
"Some people here are," Rudi says. "But I haven't quite
decided about you yet."
"Rudi is our resident authoritarian."
Just then there's a blast, a tremor of music from
somewhere. The Dead Kennedys. California Tiber Mies.
"The Punks have awoken!" Heike explains.
Afterwards, as she heads down to the U-Bahn, Justine
passes the Passionskirche. A banner hangs from its bell
tower:
SOLIDARITY WITH THE RAF HUNGER STRIKERS ! 20
So that too is squatted.
Yet everything else is so normal: people wandering in
and out of the market hall, the winos at their usual corner
on the square, cars stopping at the traffic lights. Normal.
Chaot, plural Chaoten - rioter, from 'chaos', name
given by Berlin tabloid press to protestors.
19 BZ - acronym for 'Berliner Zeitung' - a Springer
Press newspaper.
20 RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction.
21
3
March 17: the first, gestetnered issue of the Besetzer Post
appears. It announces that 115 houses are now squatted. A
week later the second issue comes out. By then it's 123. 21
"I'd like to go over sometime,” Horse says.
They are in Spectrum. A big place, monstrous in fact, the
largest Freak watering hole around. 22 And the cheapest.
Mehringhof is one of the centres of the alternative scene.
The upper storeys of the building complex house a
printers, a theatre, die Alternative Liste office, Netzwerk -
a sort of lefty bank that funds alternative projects - and
even some sort of primary school or kindergarten.
Dread smiles one of his evil smiles.
"The price for decadent Westerners the likes of us is
thirty marks now. West marks. But with that you can stuff
your capitalist self full of as much socialist beer and vodka
as you like. It's probably the most boring country in the
world. One great grey mass of sameness, with a red streak
down the middle. Only a handful of bars. Hardly any
restaurants. People queue up at four o'clock on Saturday
afternoons to get into the disco. Most of the place hasn't
gestetnered - produced on a Gestetner duplicating
machine, the predecessor of the photocopier. Waxed
paper stencils are cut through using a typewriter or
a pen/stylus. These are then used as templates from
which duplicate documents are printed. Very low cost.
Freak - a scene word, taken from the English,
describing anyone alternativish, hippyish, Punky, not
derogatory.
22
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
seen a coat of paint since the last bash-up. You can still see
the bullet holes in the walls. No drugs, peepshows, video
shops or other freedom-and-democracy essentials. Not
even a fucking Burger King."
"That's a fairly superficial analysis.”
"Okay. There are some good things about it."
"Like what?"
"They can get Western TV stations!"
"Christ, for fuck's sake, be serious!"
"Okay. There's no unemployment. And the only
Auslander are Russkis.”
Outside the U-Bahn carriage windows Kreuzberg 36
passes by. Modern post-World War Two apartment blocks
on one side, pre-World War One tenements on the other.
This section of the U-Bahn runs above the street. It's
dubbed the Istanbul Express by Berliners because of the
number of Turks who live here. Tina is browsing through
the current issue of Spiegel - the cover story is on the
failing fortunes of the SPD and associated building
scandals. 23 The party has administered the city since the
war. Berlin thrives on its building scandals. She catches a
glimpse of the Wall to the north. A divided city, like
Germany, like the world itself. She's from a Catholic
village in prosperous Baden-Wurttemberg.
Until 1871 the city had been the Prussian capital. Small.
Spartan. Neo-classical. Militaristic. A barrack city.
Engravings in old history books come to mind: officers on
horseback, handlebar moustaches, epaulets, puffs of smoke
from cannons. The battle of this and the battle of that at
23 SPD - Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.
23
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
which General, Prince, Duke so-and-so is mortally
wounded. Honour. Fatherland. Glory. Blood and iron.
Then, in 1871, victory in the Franco-Prussian War and
Berlin becomes the capital of the new nation, the new
Reich. And with the help of French 'reparations' it booms.
Twenty years later it's one of the largest cities in the world.
The centre of an empire. 600 km from Konigsberg, now
Kaliningrad, then on the eastern border with Russia, and
600 km from France.
The tenements in Kreuzberg, and in Prenzlauer Berg on
the Other Side, were built in those first twenty years of the
Reich. Tens of thousands of Polish and East Prussian
peasants flowed into the expanding city on the new
railroads in search of work and found it. Many Berliners
still have the Polish 'ski' at the ends of their names. In 1900
maybe ten or twenty percent of the population are non-
German speaking. A bit like with the Turks today. The
tenements, the Mietskaserne, a suitably militaristic word,
go up to house them. Arc put up! Block by block. The plan
is simple, thoroughly implemented, and economic. 24
The front houses sport stucco facades. The streets are
gaslit. Shops on the ground floors. The upper apartments,
spacious, with balconies, inside bathrooms and double
windows to keep out the winter that blows in on the wind
from the endless Russian steppes, are for the civil servants,
the officers, the new middle class. The back houses - one,
two, sometimes three and sometimes even more, jammed
so closely together that the sunlight never reaches the yards
between them - with their cramped apartments and shared
toilets in the stairwells house the masses, das Proletariat.
The word conjures up a diet of bread and potatoes, rags
>4 Mietskaserne - tenements, literally 'rent barracks'.
24
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
rather than clothes, dying old young, families crowded half
a dozen to a room. The back houses also house the twelve-
hour-day small factories and workshops in which many of
them worked. Pigs and even cows were kept in some of the
cellars. Proletarian sweat builds the Kaiser's Reich.
Proletarian blood oils its military machine. They are the
masses of the KPD 25 and the early SPD who turn out to
fight the Wehrmacht when it tries to artillery the Marines
out of the Kaiser's palace during the Revolution in 1919.
And what's left of them now? The Klauses? The Marias?
The Gunters? The Heikes? Some drawings by Kathe
Kollwitz who knew their pain and struggle and anonymous
heroism. And some from Zille who knew their lusts and
loves, their rare outings to the lakes and their black vulgar
humour.
Our Hero finds a leaflet in the letter box. It looks official, it
has the West Berlin coat of arms on it:
West Berlin Civil Defence Office
Rathaus Schoneberg
23 March 1981
For the attention of head of household
Re: Allocation of places in West Berlin anti¬
nuclear bunkers to civilians.
As part of our efforts to protect the civil
population in the unlikely case of a nuclear
exchange the West Berlin Civil Defence Office
is in the process of allocating access to the
city's available anti-nuclear bunkers. Places
are being allocated on a priority basis -
first to essential personnel such as members
of the city government, the civil service and
police and fire department. Regrettably, the
25 KPS - Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands.
25
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
places available to the general population
are insufficient to accommodate the entire
population of the city. So, after much
deliberation at the highest levels of the
Civil Defence Office, it has been decided
that the fairest method of allocating places
to civilians is to award each household the
right to nominate one household member for a
place in a bunker (see form on the back of
this letter). However, because current bunker
capacity is also not sufficient to allocate a
place to all city households, it has been
further decided, as provided for under
Paragraph 34, Subsection c, of the Law for
the Protection of the Civilian Population
During Wartime (Federal Law 3478), that an
official lottery will be held to select those
eligible for a place in the event of a
nuclear exchange.
Completed forms (to be filled out, signed
and dated by heads of households) need to be
submitted by 1 June 1981 and returned to this
office before close of business on that day.
Registered post is recommended as the West
Berlin Civil Defence Office cannot take any
responsibility for forms lost in the post or
otherwise mislaid/damaged.
Yours respectfully,
Helmut Muller
Assistant Bunker Allocations Officer
West Berlin Civil Defence Office
It takes Our Hero a moment to realise that somebody is
taking the piss. They must have put one in every letter box
on the street.
The demonstration turns into GneisenaustraBe. A few
hundred people. Leather jackets, masks, Palestinian
scarves, parkas, arm in arm, angry, shouting.
26
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
aufruhr! widerstand!
aufruhr! widerstand! 26
The world, going home through the electrically lit dusk,
glimpses a mob through car windscreens. Insanity.
Chaoten. Raw hate in their slogans, out to smash, taking to
the streets to terrorise at night. Nothing safe from them.
one, two, three, let the prisoners free!
kein gott! kein staat! kein vaterland!
Let who free? Law breakers? Stone throwers? Spoilt
rabble! Should be all locked up! Covering their faces like
terrorists! Supporting terrorists too - and murderers and
kidnappers and hijackers! Smashing shop windows,
burning people's cars, attacking policemen! Senseless! As
senseless as the nonsense about imperialism and freedom
they daub all over the place! Dangerous fanatics! Thank
God for the police at times like this!
Who are escorting them, in contact with Zentrale. Side
streets are cordoned off to make sure the unregistered
demonstration keeps to a certain route and remains under
control. A riot squad waits on Zossener StraBe, twenty-four
men in riot gear, like a Roman phalanx. The angry mass of
scarves and leather jackets hisses at them as they pass.
Something glides though the air. A policeman collapses to
the ground.
The bastards! They'll fucking pay for this!
"We have been attacked. We are taking defensive action.
Can you send assistance to Zossener-GneisenaustraBe!
Out!"
"Zentrale here! Understood! Assistance arriving! Out!"
Achtung, hier spricht die Polizei!
26 riot! resist!
27
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
You are taking part in an illegal gathering!
You are requested to disperse!
Achtung, hier spricht die Polizei! You are ...
The phalanx charges. As fast as lightning in slow motion.
The crowd scatters.
Run! Run! Run!
Christ! One of them's behind me! Too many people in
front of me! Swish! Something's happened! He's hit me!
And swish again! My head! My eyes! I can't see!
"GET OFF THE FUCKING STREET!"
Skull nothing but agony! Warm liquid in my eyes!
Blood! Mine! That's the road careering up to hit me!
The bastards! The scum of the earth! Beat the shit, out of
them! It's all they understand!
"Zentrale, C2 and C5 already engaged! Out!"
"Understood, C2! More assistance on the way! Out!”
The bells of the Passionskirche begin to ring.
Demonstrators jump into doorways for safety, realising
too late that they are trapped there as two or three
policeman lay into them. A young woman lies on the
ground, bleeding through her long blond hair from skull
wounds, eyes numb.
It is over almost before it begins. For the Bullen, coming
from several sides and at close quarters, with few
bystanders and easily identifiable targets, it has been a bit
of a walkover - a turkey shoot, as they say.
The ambulances begin to arrive.
"Zentrale! Illegal gathering dispersed. We are securing
the area. Out!”
Crackle.
"Zentrale, do you receive us?"
The Bullen regroup and take up positions at the
intersections that crisscross GneisenaustraBe to make sure
28
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
that no new crowds gather to disrupt the flow of homeward
bound traffic. The routed demonstrators have retreated
down the side streets. The badly wounded are being taken
to hospital in ambulances and in the cars of sympathetic
passers-by. The bells of the Passionskirche are still
ringing. The dusk has turned to darkness.
The guy who sells the taz comes into the Godot with the
next day's edition. The smoky cramped space is packed.
Standing room only. The Slits blare from the sound system.
By the window. Dmitri, pissed as a coot, is talking to
himself, raising his voice every now and again, raving on
about Bullen, Nazis and pigs. Through the same window
Our Hero sees a police transit drive by, slowing down as it
passes the squatters' bar two doors up.
Reich buys a taz and reads it aloud. Fraenkelufer 46, 48
and 50 evicted in the early hours of the morning. 2,000 riot
police on duty throughout the day. 100 injured. 15 arrests.
4 still in custody. Brutal baton charge on the
GneisenaustraBe of a spontaneous demonstration to protest
against the evictions. A photograph taken during the
eviction shows several Bullen in riot gear, one of them
grabbing a young woman by the hair so another can snap a
Polaroid of her for the files.
"Nothing about what started it in the GneisenaustraBe!"
says Our Hero. "Stupid fucking thing to do in a situation
like that - to throw a fucking stone!"
"Does it really matter?" Reich asked. "Stones are going
to be thrown anyway. If not by us, then by some Zivi or
provocateur."
"Zivi?" Our Hero asks.
"Plain clothes policeman," Reich explains.
Tina is silent. She'd come out of the U-Bahn just after it
29
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
happened and helped pick up some woman from a
doorway and walk her to an ambulance. Shutting out
images of blood, darkness and flashing blue lights from her
mind, she begins to listen to them again. Their words, with
her memory fresh, seem so much waffle.
"The demo to Rathaus Schoneberg was positive," Our
Hero says.
"Depends on your point of view," says Reich. "To the
so-called normal citizen any demonstration is a harbinger
of chaos - the exact opposite to the reassuring ordered
ranks and uniforms of a military parade. The life of the so-
called normal citizen is structured around work, the family,
consumption, but especially around work. When the
authorities that keep these structures in place are
threatened, he - or she - screams for order. Any craving for
the carnival, the fiesta, the orgiastic, is submerged under
the fear of losing the security of the identifiable
hierarchical structure that people are dependent on."
Our Hero drinks deep from his glass.
Dmitri starts roaring at the top of his voice.
"Thugs! Pigs!"
"He's in a bad way tonight!" Reich says.
"He's always in a bad way!" Tina says.
30
4
April 9: the Besetzer Post reports 134 houses squatted.
Wilde stares for the umpteenth time at the painting of the
demonstration passing under the YorkstraBe bridges on his
easel. He's never tried anything like it before. Until now
his paintings have been of private things: portraits, familiar
interiors, landscapes and cityscapes at some particularly
delicate moment. This is the first time he's tried to do
something charged with this kind of emotional energy. Or
'Power', as the Germans called it. The energy of the crowd,
the mass, the mob. Sometimes negative, sometimes
positive. The raw psychic energy of revolutions. A mass of
colour exploding from the canvas, straining to burst from
the confines of the paint. Normally his lines were carefully
drawn, very little of colours running into each other. He
had been afraid that it was too abstract, that nobody would
know what it was, but people had, even before it was
finished.
The kettle whistles in the kitchen.
While he waits for the filter coffee to brew he rolls a
ciggie and looks out the window. Dmitri is crossing the
yard to go into his place in the back house. He seems
sober. Well, it is early in the day. Dmitri had once made
films. They said. Had been heavily involved in '68 and all
that. Now he’s chaos, pissed every day, screaming at the
world at the top of his voice, destroying himself.
Some rough pastel drawings of the illegal mural they are
31
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
planning lie on the floor. The group had met yesterday
evening again and finally agreed on the image and the
slogan. Now all they have to do is find the right wall and
scrounge enough dosh together for the paint. He had long
decided to stop asking himself if it would make any
difference. They were doing something. They would go as
far as they could.
Horse finds himself strolling in the direction of the Wall.
More than the tinge of a hangover. On the way back to the
apartment from the Kneipe, Dread had methodically
defaced every election poster they came across with a
Hitler moustache. His politics are kinda weird. 27
The sun shines warm. Winter is over. Christ, it had been
cold. The night Dread took an axe to the furniture and
made firewood of if comes back to him. He shivers at the
thought of it.
The Wall: every available space on the three metre high
concrete thing is covered in graffiti. Some of it he
understands: FREIHEIT, SCHEME, IMPERIALISMUS,
LIEBE. 2X Most of the stuff in English is idiotic: ANDY
WAS HERE, ANDY LOVES JUDY, FUCK BERLIN. Up by
the Reichstag there was even supposed to be some stuff in
Irish. There's a spray-painted picture of a door with the
words EXIT written on it.
The city is a nuthouse. But then the whole human race is
suffering from terminal insanity. Here it just all seems to
come together: East and West. Communism and
Capitalism, Anarchists and Bullen, Germans and Turks,
71 Kneipe - bar.
88 Freedom, shit, imperialism, love.
32
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Amis and Russkis, Burger King and Intershop. 29
He doesn't want the summer becoming one long pub
crawl, even an al fresco one. He'd end up going to pieces,
down the proverbial drain into the proverbial gutter. Dread
with him all the way.
NO MERCY NO FUTURE!
True enough!
PROLETARIER ALLER LANDER, VEREINI&T EUCH! 30
He understands that. At least some Deutsch is sinking in.
PROLES OF ALL COUNTRIES, HURRY UP!
Should he try and get a job? Become a prole?
FUCK THE POPE!
He comes to one of the wooden viewing platforms. He
climbs up.
There are houses on the Other Side, fifty yards away,
across the no man's land between the two walls. He can
almost see in through their windows. The buildings look as
dilapidated as the ones in this part of Kreuzberg. The odd
red flag hangs limply from a balcony. There's a watch-
tower. The sun is reflecting in the glass of its windows and
makes it impossible to see inside it properly, but he can
just make out the silhouette of a border guard observing
him through a pair of binoculars. Orwell-not-so-lite.
Rabbits are grazing among concrete barriers and barbed
wire of the so-called death strip. Two camps, two tribes -
29 Amis - Americans.
Intershop - a duty-free shop, officially in East
Berlin, or rather under it, which can be reached by
taking the underground train to Friedrichstrafte. A
source of cheap cigarettes, booze, perfume and
chocolates. Strictly illegal to use, but the West
Berlin authorities more or less turn a blind eye.
30 Workers of the world, unite! More literally:
'Proletarians of all countries, unite!'
33
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
and both of them willing to burn the whole fucking planet
and everyone on it to a cinder if ever the twain shall meet.
And the Wall itself. Such a simple thing, a wall. Good
guys on this side, bad guys on that side. Good and evil. Yin
and yang.
He wonders if there are Punks on the Other Side.
Easter Sunday. Warm evening air gushes in through the
open roof of the Deux Chevaux as they - Our Hero, Heidi,
Big Bruno at the wheel - coast down towards the Ku'damn.
The chant from the dashboard cassette player - 'MDMA
MDMA MDMA' - is just right. Passing the KaDeWe
department store Big Bruno starts playing tour guide.
"A temple dedicated to the gods of consumption ..."
Spring is in the air again.
"... a symbol of the new post- or is it pre-war G-E-R-
M-O-N-E-Y ..."
They pass the preserved bombed-out shell of the
Gedachtniskirche, the old cathedral, and start down the
Ku'damn, West Berlin's main shopping street, the city's
pride and joy.
"Oh weh!" Big Bruno points out the smashed front
window of a boutique. "Looks like we've just missed
some fun." 31
"There's another!" Heidi says.
"And another!"
Our Hero has spotted more smashed windows on the
other side of the boulevard.
The usual city centre crowd, bulging with weekend
tourists from Wessiland, flows to and fro on the
pavements, curiously oblivious to the smashed windows. 32
Oh weh! - Ouch!
34
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The lights turn green.
Big Bruno drives on slowly, whistling schadenfreude.
"And not a Bulle in sight!" he laughs.
Almost every shop window has been smashed, the only
exceptions being those that have people behind them - the
restaurants, the cafes, McDonalds.
"BILD and BZ are going to have a field day," Big
Bruno chirps. 33
U-Bahn station UhlandstraBe goes by.
Heidi: "Something must have happened. An eviction?"
Big Bruno: "Hardly. It's Easter weekend. Too many
Bullen on holiday."
They pass Adenauerplatz, halfway along the three
kilometre long Ku'damm.
Big Bruno again: "German workmanship. They've done a
thorough job. "
About eighty percent of the windows will have to be
replaced.
At Halensee they turn around and head back up the other
side of West Berlin's pride and joy. No sign of the Bullen.
Burglar alarms howl and flash in vain.
Party time. Our Hero helps himself to another one of the
bottles of SchultheiB being kept cool in the half-filled
bathtub.
"... smashing up the Ku'damm," he overhears a guy say
above the music as he strolls back into the main room of
the prosperous shared apartment, "seems to me to be a
perfectly reasonable response to someone dying on hunger
Wessiland - Berlinerish for West Germany.
BILD-Zeitung - tabloid in broadsheet format,
literally 'picture paper', a Springer Press
newspaper.
35
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
strike...”
The place is filling. The party's getting under way. One
guy is already drunk and crashed out in the hammock. A
Punky-looking woman, a Mercedes star hanging from her
neck, is rocking him to and fro.
Rita's alone at the buffet table. It's her going-away party.
She's packing up, leaving. It happens regularly.
"How long you been here?"
"Five years."
A hunk in a white jacket and striped trousers appears. He
and Rita plunge with Germanic enthusiasm into a hugging
bout.
Our Hero moves on.
Bodies move in the dance area.
Alcohol. Sex. Excitement. Tenderness. The lack of it.
Someone taps him on the shoulder.
It's Reich, for some reason the last person he
expected to meet here.
"We are going to bring out a paper too," Reich says, "a
newsletter."
"We?"
"Yes, the Irren-Offensive. The Lunatics' Offensive.
The Lunatics' Attack. The group's been going for a
while now. People from the hospital, students and
outpatients. Articles about psychiatry written mainly
by patients and not by so-called experts. We're
planning to have an exhibition in one of the squatted
houses in Schoneberg.”
"Anti-psychiatry?"
"Yes, Laing ...," Our Hero begins to say. 34
R. D. Laing (1927-1989), Scottish psychiatrist,
critic of the psychiatry establishment. The Politics
of Experience and the Bird of Paradise is perhaps his
36
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
But someone has changed the record. The Sex
Pistols. Loud.
"I think I'll go dance a bit," Reich roars to make
himself heard above it.
Our Hero heads back towards the SchultheiB in the
bathtub.
best known work. Quotes: 'We live in a moment of
history where change is so speeded up that we begin
to see the present only when it is already
disappearing' and 'Life is a sexually transmitted
disease and the mortality rate is one hundred
percent'.
37
5
April 28: the Besetzer Post reports 150 houses squatted.
Walpurgisnacht. Witchnight. Three thousand women
take to the streets in a torch-light demo. At
Hermanplatz they dance and leap over a crackling
spark-spewing fire. Tina and Justine, their faces made
up witchy-white, are among the dancing jumpers.
May Day morning. Checkpoint Charlie. When
Mondbogen 35 - her adopted German name - reaches
the sunny no man's land between the Allied and East
German checkpoints she hangs banners on the
railings. Military men on both sides observe her
through binoculars as she takes off her clothes,
garlands herself with spring flowers and dances. Her
small oriental body moves gracefully, the mane of her
waist-length raven-black hair swirling about her like a
living cloak. She closes her eyes, obliterating the men
in uniform, the guns, the barbed wire, opening herself
up to the cosmic tranquillity that's there for them all if
only they too would open themselves up to it. The
word PEACE is written on her banners. In German,
English, French and Russian.
35 Mondbogen - moonbow, rainbow produced by light
reflected from the moon rather than sunlight.
38
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The sun has yet to rise above the rooftops. The street
lamps are still on. The streets are empty. A clapped-
out banger of an Opel stops. Four figures get out and
start unloading tins of paint from the booth.
A young woman in a parka begins marking out the
outlines of the painting-to-be on the large bricked-up
window of the old corner shop with a stick of white
chalk. The other two are already prising open the tins,
stirring the paint and sorting out the brushes. Wilde,
getting a small stepladder from the back seat, looks up
and down the cobblestoned streets. No sign of any
Bullen.
They begin, each at their pre-assigned tasks. They
work fast. Perched on the stepladder Wilde sweeps on
the sky-blue. Below him someone else does the grey
silhouette of a city roofscape.
The mural quickly takes shape.
Black airplanes fill the sky-blue sky and black
bombs pour out of them like black rain onto a city
engulfed in tongues of orange and red fire.
Underneath, the woman in the parka paints the slogan:
SOME THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEACE!
-ALEXANDER HAIG 36
They only allow themselves little more than a
second or two of appreciation before they gather up
their gear and stuff it back into the booth of the
Opel. A minute later they are safely back on the main
street again.
"And now for a well-deserved champagne
breakfast!" the driver says, as a transit full of Bullen
36 US Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan.
39
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
passes them on the other side.
Gleeful smiles of triumph.
May 6: the Besetzer Post reports 167 houses squatted.
Smash! Thud! Bang! What the fucking hell?
"That's the wrong door!" Joschka shouts, visions of
the Punk crowd coming back pissed and knocking up
the place flashing through his sleep-fuzzed mind.
"Open up! Polizei!”
It's not the Punks.
ScheiBe! A search. Another one.
Rage at the imaginary transgressions of the Punks
vanishes.
"Have some patience!”
But before he can untangle himself from his
sleeping bag the door is open and a helmeted shape
is shining a torch in his face.
"House search. Get dressed and come with us.
Bring your papers!"
Another helmeted figure - dumpier - appears.
"Get up!" he barks.
A real no-brain.
Joschka instinctively concentrates on the other one.
"What are you looking for?"
"Suspected theft of electricity and water!"
Joschka drags his clothes on, his pullover the wrong
way around.
"Whose is that?" no-brain demands, the torch-beam
resting on the portable TV set in the corner.
"No idea!"
"Do you have a licence for it? A receipt?"
The other one just looks more or less disinterestedly
40
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
around the place waiting for him to finish dressing.
They take him down the stairs and hand him over to
two others. He prepared himself mentally for the next
few hours. Finger printing? The cells?
"This way, please," one of the new escort says,
leading him by the sleeve.
Once through the house door and out on the street
the morning light makes him squint. There are transits
and olive-green uniforms everywhere.
"Stand there!" says his captor, placing him against
the wall.
There's a bluish flash.
"Dankeschon!" says a voice from the same direction.
It's only then he sees the camera.
They've just taken a Polaroid of him for the files.
"Papers!" another one demands.
He hands him the laminated card.
They were unlikely to bring them to the station if
they are doing the identity checking here.
Another uniform leads him to one of the transits.
Some of his housemates have already been already
processed and are inside it. They exchange smiles as
he climbs in.
Horse, in his underpants, answers the screeching rattle
of the apartment bell. It’s a Paddy.
"I'm looking for the cartoonist," Our Hero says.
"Enter, fellow son of the Gael!"
Down a dark corridor.
Dread, unshaven, is still in bed, i.e. a mattress on
the floorboards.
The sun shines in through the fourth-floor balcony
windows onto the mess of overflowing ashtrays,
41
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
empty bottles, bits of paper, dirty tea cups and other
crud. A far cry from artist's studio that Our Hero had
imagined on his way across Kreuzberg.
Horse disappears into the kitchen to make tea.
Our Hero introduces himself to Dread and explains
his business: the Magazine, the need for cartoons.
Dread shows Our Hero some of his oeuvres.
Some of the cartoons are on sheets of white paper
but most are on torn-out copybook pages, beer mats,
backs of cereal cartons, on brown wrapping paper.
Most of them are rough sketches, unfinished. Our
Hero laughs out loud at some of them, especially the
Ronnie Raygun one.
Horse reappears with a pot of tea and three clean
cups.
"Got that idea from his speech about carrying the
fight for freedom and democracy into space," Dread
explains.
Horse pours the tea.
"I have an idea for another one. It goes like this.
Nancy and Ronnie are in bed in the White House."
He mimics Reagan's drawl. "Nancy, 1 had a real
swell dream last night. What was that, honey? 1
dreamt the Russkis were hamburgers and 1 was a
microwave."
Our Hero laughs. Horse has heard it before.
"Christ," Dread says, "I still have a hangover. Is
there anything left in that bottle?"
There is. A finger of vodka.
"Na zdorovje!”
He empties the bottle in one slug.
"Russian for Prost," he explains.
"You been here long?" Our Hero asks.
42
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Too long for my liver," Dread says. "Two years. I was in
West Germany first. In some dump a few miles from
Stuttgart. Working in a mine. They were recruiting in
Dublin. A few of us went along. Thought 1 didn't
stand a chance, but 1 was willing to try anything to
get out of that kip. 1 thought you'd have to be
well-built, muscular like. But it's all mechanised
now. The Krauts didn't know what hit them. They
were expecting nice quite Gastarbeiter - like the Turks. Not
a shower of drunken Paddies. Most of us got fired."
"How is Dublin these days?" Our Hero asks.
"Fucked and getting fuckeder by the minute," Horse
says. "Half the place is on smack. Plenty of good
Lebanese around though, what with the boys in green
being over there with the UN.”
Our Hero laughs. Dread smiles.
"Sometimes 1 wonder just how serious these
squatters are," Horse says at one stage.
"Christ!" Dread says. "If you don't think that
throwing stones at cops and smashing bank windows
isn't serious, go out and fucking do it yourself!"
Our Hero speaks: "It's people doing something. It's
not just sitting around whining about the way things
are. And it's more than just moving into empty
houses, it's people taking responsibility for their own
lives and being willing to defend that - on the streets
when necessary. I see it as a kind of sanity in an
insane world. Just look at all this star wars crap from
Reagan. That's not just on television - it's for real.”
"Go on!” Horse says.
"It's an attempt to live communally without the
state and private property. Sounds like something
from a pamphlet but those words do actually mean
43
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
something. Just look at the wall paintings, at the
demonstrations, at the music, the way people dress,
and compare it to so-called normal society. It's not
without pretensions or bullshit or anything else but
it's alive. Its heart is in the right place. The squatters
have woken this city up. Those transits you see all
over the place weren't there last year. The state takes
it all very seriously. At the very least it's a fistful of sand
in the mega-machine."
"You know," Horse says, "if you said that in Dublin
they'd think you were taking the piss.”
Our Hero is not sure how that has been meant.
"At least a lot of the people 1 hang around with
would," Horse explains. "1 suppose that's what's
wrong with the place. It's just that 1 tend to be a bit
of a sceptical cynic sometimes.”
"Nothing like healthy scepticism!"
"Our Hero is involved with some people who want
to start a zine," Dread informs Horse.
Horse gets up and takes a pile of fanzines from the
mainly comic-stocked bookshelf and drops them on
the floor.
"Which just happens to be the kind of shite I'm
addicted to," he says.
On May 10 elections to the West Berlin Senate are
held. Contesting the elections for the first time, the
Alternative Liste (AL), a broad coalition of
ecologists, feminists, socialists, citizen action
groups, anarchists (of a kind), radicals, gays, Turkish
and other minority groups, win 13 seats with 8.5% of
the vote. But the Christian Democrats (CDU), though
44
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
they have not obtained an overall majority, are the
new city government.
"They've painted the mural over," Wilde says.
"Who!" Joschka asks.
"The keepers of the peace! Who else?"
"Any particular colour?"
"Grey. What else! One of those Technical Service
vehicles appeared a few hours after we'd done it and
painted the whole thing over."
"Forlorn is the poet who is ignored by the tyrant."
"But we went back and sprayed a big stamp on it
saying CENSORED. With a big stencil. Like those
official stamps with the eagle on it. Weirdly enough,
that's still there."
Tina and Reich are sitting in the mid-afternoon sun
at one of the tables outside the Locus drinking
cappuccinos. He thinks the election result - the
Alternative Liste getting into the Senate - is a step
forward. She has kicked off her sandals and is
resting her bare feet on the crossbar of the table.
"I suppose so," she agrees, not very convincingly,
spooning the cream from the top of her cappuccino.
On the square opposite: groups of Turkish women
sit gossiping, children are playing and the winos
occupying their usual corner.
"I saw Joschka the other day," Reich says.
The three of them come from the same small West
German town. Though Tina only knows Joschka
vaguely.
"He's been here since the beginning of the year,"
Reich explains. "He's refused to do any kind of
45
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
military service, even the non-combatant
alternative.”
Residents of Berlin are not obliged to do military
service, with the result that thousands of West
German conscientious objectors come to live in the
city. But it means staying for five years - officially.
It’s a Cold War, a two-Germanies anomaly.
"Where's he living?"
"In the squat on the corner of Heim- and Willibald-
Alexis-StraBe."
"What are you up to these days?" he asks.
"Nothing!"
"It's very good sometimes to do nothing. Sometimes
it's the best thing to do. We don't do enough of doing
nothing."
"Why do you always have to do that?"
"What?"
"The psychology bit."
Reich seems to like nothing better than explaining
people's own behaviour to them as if it’s all just a
matter of psycho-mechanics. But, on the other hand,
when you really needed it, there is nobody better you
can talk to. Not because of anything he might say. But
because he listens.
"I'm looking for somewhere new to live," she says.
"I'm sick of living on my own. But it's not easy to get
into a shared place."
"You could try squatting!"
"Not sure I could live with that many other people.”
Reich indicates behind her.
"We have company."
Our Hero she knows. The blondish tense-looking
guy with the sheepish grin is called Horse. Irish too,
46
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
but doesn't speak German.
They pull up chairs.
"We were up at the house," Our Hero says. "We've
been looking at the empty apartments adjoining
mine. We're thinking about squatting them, joining
them together - knocking down some of the walls -
and making one large space."
"You're not afraid they will throw you out if you do
that?" Tina asks.
Our Hero shrugs.
"And who are your partners in crime?" Tina asks.
"Horse here for a start. But we will need more."
"What are you saying about me?" Horse asks
suspiciously.
"He is saying you are going to squat a house,"
Reich informs him in English.
"1 said I'd think about it,” Horse says. "I haven't
agreed to anything."
"Can I come and look sometime maybe?" Tina asks.
"I'm looking for somewhere to live."
"Sure, anytime,” Our Hero says. "Be glad to show
you around."
Synchronicity.
47
6
May 14: the Besetzer Post reports 177 houses squatted.
Justine moves naked through the murky lake water.
There's still a chill in it but the sun beats down on her
wet hair and shoulders. When it becomes too shallow
to swim anymore she stands up and lets gravity
reclaim her body.
"How's the water?" Antonia asks, lying face down on
her blue and yellow towel. The smooth white skin of
her shoulders, buttocks and long hairy-calved legs are
beginning to redden.
"Nirvana."
She looks over across the lake. Her mind is still
uncluttered from the joint she had earlier. Above the
green line of foliage on the opposite shore a jet is
coming in to land at Tegel, the roar of its engines
seeming to come from another part of the sky.
She rolls a cigarette.
She feels good in this world of sun and water and
nude people basking in it.
Our Hero is in Spectrum, holding forth: "1968! Full
employment, affluence, the post-war dream is
coming true. Hope. Optimism. That's what the
hippies were about. Flower power. Mind-expanding
drugs. Faith in technology. It's the Space Age. Major
Tom to Ground Control. Techno-faith. 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Half the human race sees the moon landing
48
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
on the box. The Age of Aquarius is dawning. The
Earth photo - of that nice little blue planet wrapped
in fluffy cotton-wool clouds floating in the blackness
of the void - is everywhere. Pan Am are flogging
tickets for the first passenger flights to the fucking
moon. Detente is in the air. Some people even believe
that the US and the USSR will become similar, merge
even, the best of both systems emerging in some sort
of benign global space-age super-state. But nobody's
been to the moon for donkey's years now. The
Christmas tree of technology has lost its glitter.
People are still dying of hunger, except you can see it
on the box now. Utopia's out. Dystopia's in. Science
will kill us - either through pollution or Armageddon.
The arsenals are full and the Cold War is on again.
There are enough bombs to blow us all apart several
times over and we want more. Bright colours, flowers
in your hair, a guitar on your back, a copy of
Siddhartha or whatever it's called in your pocket and
wandering off to seek enlightenment in India is out.
Rags, black, safety pins and Mohawks are in.
Darkness is in. NO FUTURE. The Age of Aquarius
didn't happen and it ain't goin' to. Capitalism and
communism have become similar - in their worse
aspects. We're fucked. NO FUTURE. The species is at
the end of the road. Roll on Doctor Strangelove and
the mushroom clouds. Unless the aliens land. Or
there's a world revolution.”
"Nah, there'll be a future," Horse says.
Our Hero looks at him.
"It's just that it'll be like something out of a bad
science fiction novel."
49
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The Springer Press newspapers accuse the writers and
distributors of the fake nuclear bunker letter of
forgery and terrorising the population.
Joschka is with the first group to leave the house and
take the U-Bahn to Winterfeldtplatz. They're wearing
scarves and gym shoes - and carrying those plastic
lemons with lemon juice in them, lemon juice being a
pretty good antidote to tear gas. They get out at
Nollendorfplatz and head down towards the square.
Groups of transits are touring the area.
He feels good. Though not without fear. It's the
way he usually feels before 'going into action'. Free
too. He's drawing a clear line between himself and ...
the system, the machine. Refusing to do military
service and coming to West Berlin was also drawing
a line. So was moving into the house. He is still
within the law but, he sometimes wonders, for how
long more.
They reach Winterfeldtplatz. A transit, its sides
dented by the cobblestones of previous riots, passes
between them and the multicoloured Besetzer mural
on the public toilet opposite. He gives the transit the
finger.
There's quite a crowd about. Most of the people are
hanging around behind the barricade made from
plundered building material that's been erected near
the threatened house and is blocking the street from
pavement to pavement. Piles of cobblestones, prised
out of the pavement earlier, lie strewn about - for
later.
They pass a group tearing down a Marlboro
'Freedom and Adventure' billboard and join in,
50
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
helping them rip the cowboy photograph from its
hoarding, carry it away and throw it onto the
barricade.
He finds a familiar face, a woman - can't remember
her name - from a house in Kohlfurter StraBe. She's
sitting on the steps of one of the houses.
"Looks like it's finally begun. Wouldn't have any
baccy by any chance?"
She hands him a near empty pack.
"It's been on the cards since the CDU got in,” she
says. "And this is obviously the place to start. After
all, it's only a stone's throw from here to the
Ku'damm. No pun intended.”
"What's been happening?"
"The Bullen arrived at dawn - with building workers
and demolition equipment. But a lot of people had
turned out. There were more here earlier. The Bullen
were taken totally off guard and before they knew it
that" - she indicates the barricade - "was going up.
Then some AL people arrived and started talking to
the owners." The house is owned by the Catholic
Church. "The church people eventually agreed to
postpone the evictions for another two weeks but the
Bullen said they would only agree to that if the
barricade came down. That's what the guy from the
AL said anyway. But nobody wants to take the
barricade down until the Bullen disappear from the
area. So it's a sort of stalemate right now. The Bullen
are just driving around the place, and the barricade is
not coming down."
He sits in the cool of the doorway to smoke. The
sound of The Sex Pistols blares from the upper
windows of the threatened house. They were actually
51
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
stopping an eviction. That hasn't happened before. A
Punk is bashing two cobblestones against each other
to the rhythm of the music. Some people are barefoot.
The cogs of the machine have been brought to a halt -
for the moment.
Click. Justine snaps a photo of the remnants of the
'Freedom and Adventure' billboard on the barricade.
Click. This is the real thing, she thinks, up until now
she has known it only at second hand, from newspaper
reports, pamphlets, from tales told in Szenekneipen. 37
None of this is supposed to be happening. But neither
were 1789, 1848, the Paris Commune supposed to
have happened. Nor the revolutionette, May 1968.
But there is another side to all that she sees:
violence. It's out there, waiting, abstract as yet,
unformed, beyond the crowd, beyond the patrolling
transits, beyond the physicality of what is happening
around her, poised to slice into it, smashing glass and
skulls.
She loads a new roll of the cheap East German film
from Intershop into the camera. A ritual of her craft.
She remembers a photograph: executed
communards, black and white, the contorted faces of
strangers from another time, rows and rows of them in
plain pine coffins.
The evening sun sets somewhere behind the streets of
houses. Shadows and then darkness comes. Only a
matter of time now, Joschka thinks, taking a slug of
SchultheiB.
Szenekneipe - from 'Szene' and 'Kneipe', scene bar,
an 'alternative bar'.
52
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"I'm moseying down to Winterfeldtplatz," Dread says,
putting his Doc Martens on. "You cornin'?"
Horse: "Naw! Don't feel like walking into something
I know nothing about. But disable a few Bullen for
me anyway!"
Dread has no illusions about why he is going. It's
simply to work out his frustrations, as he put it in the
Kneipe the other night. And maybe aim his aggression
in halfway the right direction for a change, instead of
at himself. And the bastards are fair game - the risk to
him is far greater than it is to them.
Joschka, a cobblestone in each hand, waits in the
darkness. There is a group of them. He should be tired
- he's been lobbing stones at the patrolling transits for
nearly half an hour - but he isn't. The animal in him is
thriving on the adrenalin.
One, two, three sets of transit headlights slowly
round the corner. And flashing lights. Cold bursts of
neon blueness. His breath quickens behind the damp
scarf that covers his face. The transit motors roar.
They accelerate. A hail of cobblestones flies through
the air, battering the green metallic hulk of the first
one as it speeds past. A second hail hits the back door
of the third one. That should make the bastards think
twice about stopping and getting out.
Dread is one of the others. He wants what he likes to
call 'a direct hit' - to actually hit one of the mindless
fuckers, not just one of their poxy transits. But for
that he'll have to wait until they stop and actually get
out. He's had a few bottles of SchultheiB and few
measures of schnapps.
He sees more blue flashes approaching. One, two,
53
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
three, four, five of them. Glancing back to check his
escape route to the barricade, he gets into position and
throws his first stone. It hits the metallic hulk of the
transit amidst a hail of other stones. Brakes screech
and the transits come to a sudden rocking halt, their
back doors swinging open. Dread aims his second
cobblestone at one of the first of the Bullen to jump
out. It bounces off the guy's shield. More Bullen
tumble out of the transits, half a dozen from each
transit. Another hail of stones flies through the air.
The street fighters turn and run towards the protection
of the barricade. It just over fifty metres away but
unhampered, as the Bullen are, by heavy protective
gear, they reach it safely. Dread takes another stone
from the pocket of his donkey jacket as he runs past
some panicking drinkers outside Slumberland
scuttling like mad into the narrow doorway of the
Kneipe. He glances back. There's a lone Bulle less
than twenty metres behind him. Glasses of beer from
the crowd rain in the direction of Bulle and of another
one following close behind him. Dread turns around.
The Bulle is laying into someone curled up on the
pavement with his white baseball bat-like baton. Now,
now, Dread's will screams at him, now, do it now! He
takes aim at the Bulle's momentarily unprotected
chest and throws. The cobblestone grazes the Bulle's
shield and hits him on the shoulder. He stumbles
backwards - the pain contorting his face invisible
behind his faceless visor. The image ingrains itself in
Dread's mind's eye. He turns and runs towards the gap
at the side of the barricade which at that precise
moment is being engulfed in flames.
54
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"It was fucking crazy! There was fighting all over the
place. But you only saw what was going on around
you," Justine tells someone later. "I was in
Slumberland. It's a schicky-micky place. No political
posters or anything like that. But still more or less on
our side. The place was packed. They were doing a
roaring trade. People were looking out through the
plate glass windows at what was happening on
Winterfeldtplatz - as if the world outside was some
sort of goldfish bowl. Or the other way around? It was
surreal: Bob Marley's 'stand up, stand up for your
rights' playing full blast on the stereo and outside the
Bullen dodging stones and beating the shit out of
anyone they could catch. The barricade was in flames
by then. There were also people milling around
outside, drinking. Every time the Bullen stopped and
jumped out of their transits there was a mad rush to
get in through the door with people jettisoning their
bottles and glasses by throwing them at the Bullen.
They'd just manage it in a nick of time and leave the
Bullen outside staring at us through the plate glass
windows. People were giving them the finger and
making faces at them. Some of the Bullen were
tapping at the glass with their batons to say: You just
wait! And all the time Bob Marley in the background
singing 'stand up, stand up for your rights'. One or two
people were caught outside and the Bullen gave them
a right going over. Some Sanis had set up a sort of
First Aid station in one corner for the injured. Some
people were quite badly hurt, bleeding from the head.
The taz reckoned that over a hundred people were
injured altogether. However, once we were inside the
Kneipe we were safe. The door was made of solid
55
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
steel. As the night went on and the people were
getting drunker and the Bullen angrier. Eventually one
of them managed to wedge a baton in the door. Merde
alors, was there panic then! People running all round
the place, trying to get as far away from the door as
possible. Luckily, 1 was at the end furthest away. 1
was going to take out my camera, but 1 thought better
of it. Outside, about twenty of them had lined up in a
row and some officer was barking an order. It must
have been for them to change batons. They clipped
their big wooden ones to the inside of their shields
and took out their small black rubber ones, the ones
they use inside. 1 was shitting myself. Most people
were, except those that were too pissed or furious and
were calling them pigs and assholes and anything else
they could think of. When they burst in they were met
by a hail of glasses, bottles, chairs and ashtrays, but it
all just bounced off their shields and helmets. They
went straight for the Sanis and a few who'd been
earmarked for making faces at them through the
window got belted around too. Then, screaming and
shouting at us, they frogmarched us out of the place.
It was easy enough for them - everybody just wanted
to get out of there. Outside, they lined us up against
the wall, made a few arrests, all guys, and told us to
disappear. Some people did, but, most refused to go
until ambulances for the injured were called."
56
7
"This one is easy to get into," Our Hero says to Tina,
kicking the door open.
It's the usual one room and kitchen, in good nick.
Basically needing only a coat of paint. He shows her
the wall in the hall he intends to knock down.
"We can turn the kitchen into a bathroom eventually.
The plumbing is all there. All it needs is a bathtub, a
gas heater and a few days' work.” One outside
stairwell toilet is shared by the four apartments and
that cannot be changed. "There is one other room free,
but it's in the worst condition of the lot."
She had kind of hoped that Horse would be around.
"Is your friend, Horse, going to move in?" she asks.
"I'll show you the room he wants."
"And when are you going to knock down the
walls?" she asks, following him out into the
courtyard.
"I'd like to do it right now but Horse and I are tied
up with getting the Magazine together. But if you
want to move in, just go for it!"
He shows her the other apartment through the
window. It consists of two rooms of about equal size.
The plan is for one room to be joined to the kitchen
in his apartment to form a common room - the other
is the one Horse wants.
"As you can see, the windows need some panes of
glass and there's a fair amount of plastering to be
57
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
done."
The fourth and last apartment is full of junk. It is
also the only one that cannot be connected up to the
others.
"Well?" he says finally, leaning against the window
sill, taking out his tobacco.
She makes a face.
"I'll go for it," she says.
June 5: the Besetzer Post reports 181 houses squatted.
"It was a victory," Joschka says. "We stopped an
eviction."
"Caught them momentarily off guard, that's all, is
more like it," Wilde replies.
Typical, Joschka thinks, stirring honey into his
coffee.
"It's a mistake " Wilde goes on, "to see things too
much in terms of the street or giving the Bullen a
good trashing. We need wider perspectives."
"But it's the streets and direct action which is
keeping the movement going."
A change of subject.
"Any new plans for wall paintings?"
"Yes, one."
They go into the studio.
As Wilde roots around behind some canvases,
Joschka notices the painting of the demo going under
the YorckstraBe bridges.
"That would make a good poster!" he says.
Wilde spreads a roll of brown paper out on the
floor. It has a sketch for a proposed wall painting on
it.
58
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"This is still pretty rough," he explains. "These are
supposed to be bubbles - glass cages. There is a
person in each, alone - one with a TV set, another
with a car, and so on.”
"Alienation."
"And the fragile pointlessness of consumer life."
"And what is that figure there - in the background?"
"Death - with a scythe. Just about to harvest. The
working title's If you only knew what plans they have
for you! This time we want to be a bit more subtle
than the last time. Might save it from being painted
over as soon as it sees the light of day. Give it some
time to work on brain cells."
"A grey wall with CENSORED stamped all over it
works on brain cells too."
"What time is it?" Horse mutters from the couch.
"Half-past ten," Our Hero informs him, opening the
windows. "It's a scorcher outside. I've been down the
market getting some goodies for breaky. If you can
bear to arise to face another day on planet Earth -
and clear this mess up - it'll be ready in ten minutes."
The previous night's events flash through Horse's
fuzzy mind. Schelmihl. Incessant talk about the
Magazine. Tequilas, pinches of salt, slices of lemon.
Vitamin C. Then back here to Our Hero's and a joint
before crashing out. City birdsong drifts through the
open windows. Yin to the yang of his hungover soul.
"How's the head?" Our Hero shouts from the
kitchen.
"Still there!"
"Funny. I don't have any hangover at all, and that's
rare. Probably to do with my state of mind while I'm
59
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
drinking, I suppose."
"It's chemicals! All states of consciousness can be
explained chemically. That's why people use drugs."
Horse clears the table of the previous night's mess.
Our Hero appears with the bacon, eggs and fresh
white bread rolls.
"All groups, cultures, individuals can be classified
by the drugs they use. Every culture is into
something. The hippies were into dope and acid, the
Punks are alcohol users - as well as being into
smack. Gays are into poppers. The desperate
housewife survives on Valium. The American
Indians were into peyote ... and tobacco. The ancient
Celts were off their bops on mushrooms ... and into
booze. Skinheads are into speed."
They start to eat.
"And what about the staff of the White House? The
Bullen?”
"Coke. Only the best for the upper two percent. The
Bullen would be mainly into alcohol, but then nearly
everyone in our society is. Drugs are a constant in
human culture. The Second World War was run on
speed. 'Just pop vun of zeese little pills, Fritz, und you vill
be in Moscow before you know it.' And Vietnam was
run on smack and acid. All this moralising about
them is just a load of shite.”
Our Hero pours cups of strong Aldi filter coffee.
"And what about this one?" he asks.
"Caffeine is really potent. It's just that we consume
so much of the stuff we don't notice. Coffee houses
used to be hot beds of revolution in England, and
illegal at one stage, I think. Ban it and you'd have
caffeine barons - and a 'war on caffeine'.”
60
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Maybe that was because by drinking coffee instead
of gin they were able to halfway engage in the
mental activity called thinking," Our Hero suggests.
"And it wasn't just thoughts of revolutions that were
spinning around their caffeine-enhanced and
nicotine-enhanced brains. The East India Company
and Lloyds were also run from coffee dens. We were
discussing hangovers."
"Paddy Catholic guilt sets off chemical reactions in
Paddy Catholic brain experiencing alcohol
deprivation."
"Guilt releases chemicals. Or chemicals induce
guilt. Shouldn't it be either one or the other?"
"That's just Western dualism. Cause and effect
stuff. Linear. Things happen together. Cause and
effect is only an aspect of that, not the whole thing.”
"Elucidate," Our Hero urges.
"Take a Western science par excellence: nuclear
physics. A thing is isolated - an atom in this case -
and certain things are done to it. It goes boom. Bang.
Typically Western. Me-no-understand. Me-take-it-
asunder. Me-make-it-go-bang.”
"My name iz Wernher von Braun. 1 make ze
rockets zhat go up. Where zee come down iz not my
department."
"And from all that they form a theory about what
the thing is supposed to be like inside. Not that it has
an inside. And in the end what do we really know
about atoms? Luck all! Except that if you do A and B
to one it goes bang! And then we put as many bangs
as will fit on top of Wernher's rockets."
Our Hero rolls a ciggie, the glorious first one of the
day, enjoying Horse's mishmash of bullshit and
61
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
perhaps insight.
"What's today's activity schedule?" Horse asks,
making an impressive impersonation of an upbeat
Californian.
"Pretending to be Kurt Vonnegut for a few hours.
Then to see if my unemployment money has come
through at the bank."
"If you give me some of your stories, I'll have a look
at them, and give you my informed literary opinion on
said documents."
It's just after three in the morning. Joschka and Big
Bruno, the latter doing the driving, most of the
talking and choosing the tapes, are doing a night
watch shift. They are leaving Kreuzberg 36 and are
heading down KopischstraBe towards Chamissoplatz,
passing the house known as K5.
"A nuthouse, if there ever was one," Big Bruno
remarks.
They turn left onto Willibald-Alexis-StraBe.
"All quiet on the Western front tonight," he goes
on. "If I didn't enjoy driving and listening to music -
and irregular hours - I'd never have put my name
down for this.”
Joschka does not quite approve of Big Bruno's
flippancy. He'd put his name down out of something
akin to a sense of duty ... a word hopelessly loaded
with reactionary connotations.
"Yeah, I suppose it is boring," he admits.
Though several times a convoy of transits had been
spotted on its way to search or evict a house - and the
telephone chain had been activated. And once,
supposedly, a patrol had come across a group of
62
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Faschos about to petrol bomb a house.
Big Bruno suddenly slows the battered VW bus
down.
There's a transit up ahead of them - one of the older
blue ones. They can just make out its shape in the
gaslight. It's stopped outside Krautscho, the Besetzer
cafe a few doors down from Godot.
Its back doors suddenly swing open and two
helmeted Bullen, shields at the ready, jump out, one
of them dashing towards the cafe door, grabbing
something and carrying it back to the transit.
"A chair!" Joschka shakes his head in disbelief. "A
fucking chair! They're after taking one of the chairs
left outside."
The transit speeds off into the darkness.
"City ordinance X, paragraph Y, sub-section Z,
regulating the number of chairs allowed on the
pavement outside cafes, Kneipen and restaurants, also
specifies that without specific permission the leaving
of chairs and tables out overnight is verboten. The
law's the law is the law.”
They turn down HeimstraBe, heading towards the
next Besetzer stronghold in Schoneberg.
Justine's photograph of the burning 'Freedom and
Adventure' placard is in the Besetzer Post. She'd sent
it off to them on spec.
She hands the magazine to Antonia. They are in
Slumberland. It's half-past ten. Early yet.
Justine is drinking Weizenbier. Things are looking
up. She'd gotten her first unemployment cheque the
day before yesterday. And now her photograph has
been published.
63
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The Weizenbier is cool and tangy. German New
Wave is coming over the stereo. The chic clientele in
their chic clothes and chic hair styles are drinking
their upmarket drinks. A change from the dour
politicos of Kreuzberg. She's come a long way from
being a secretary in a fluorescent-lit glass and
aluminium office block. The train of events that
brought her here drifts though her mind. A sunny day
on a Camargue beach. Rainer: blond, fun-loving,
sensitive, serious, speaking French with a charming
German accent. Fucking under ancient Mediterranean
stars. But holidays end and it's back to secretary-
world and rat race. Letters. The allure of a distant
city. German lessons at the Goethe Institute in Paris.
And then one snowy morning, breakfasting in a cafe
at Pont Neuf, Notre Dame visible in the distance, she
makes a decision. Driving to West Germany in her
Deux Chevaux. But the Teutonic knight in shining
armour drinks too much. His fun-loving
metamorphosed into irresponsibility, his seriousness
into moroseness, his sensitivity into touchiness and
jealousy. The summer magic is gone. She leaves him.
He wishes her luck and means it. Months spent in
rooms in various shared apartments. Surfing the
waves of the sea of the world.
"This magazine has come on," Antonia says, closing
it and putting it down. "From a few barely legible and
badly gesternered sheets of paper stapled together,
every second sentence a mindless slogan ... to nicely
printed, glossy cover, informative articles."
"I fancy a tequila," Justine suggests.
Antonia doesn't need any coaxing to join her.
64
8
The words on Our Hero's notepad swim in the heat
and a fly crawls over the sloppily typewritten sheet of
paper. Fuck, it's too hot to write. But the sun on his
bare back and buttocks feels good. Further down from
him, near the tall leafy trees, two women are also sun
bathing in the nude. Usually in the Hasenheide, unlike
at the lakes, people are a bit inhibited about stripping
off. It's been a long time, too long, since he's last
made love, fucked. The half-drunken one night stands
since Petra, which were rare enough anyway, hardly
count. Sexuality. Should be simple. But it isn't.
He allows his back to bake for a while before
turning over. Hatha Yoga time. He relaxes, limb by
limb, muscle by muscle, and eventually feels like
lead, as if he is being pulled into the earth.
Later, smoking a roll-up, he contemplates the blue
sky, the burning sphere and the green grass. There are
insects everywhere. And people on rugs, children
playing, Turkish women in multicoloured shawls
picnicking with their toddlers.
The two Matisse-women are still there, lying
motionless on their fronts. Is he ever going to get out
of thinking, whenever he sees an eligible female, that
she might be it, 'the one'? Pathetic really.
Tina springs to mind. He finds her physically
attractive but ... the thought is somehow depressing,
chasm-opening.
65
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
There's that Gastarbeiter Turkish guy again, middle-
aged, moustached, in God only knows what kind of a
shitty job - he'd noticed him earlier - walking past the
two women, slowing down as he approaches them,
staring at them, this time blatantly. What kind of a
sexual world does he live in, Our Hero wonders.
"Get away, you creep!"
Angry women's voices.
"Piss off!"
And the sad figure in the shabby dark suit, out of
place in sun-drenched Arcadia, begins to quickly walk
away, muttering: "Excuse me! Excuse me!"
Schreiner plants the portable black and white
television set in the corner of the room on a wooden
box, collapses into the old armchair and prises the
top off the day's second bottle of SchultheiB with his
teeth.
"The opium of the people," Big Bruno says. "And
cheaper than a lobotomy."
"SchultheiB?"
"No, television."
Schreiner is moving into the apartment on the
second floor of Willibald-Alexis-StraBe 11, squatting
it. Big Bruno has helped him move his stuff in the
VW from the overcrowded place in GroBbeerenstraBe
where he'd been crashing since the Fraenkelufer
eviction. He has spent the last week painting it and
generally doing it up. Finally, he's moved in.
He's glad to be out of GroBbeerenstraBe. No group
feeling. Certainly not in comparison to Fraenkelufer.
He'd gotten off H there. Big Bruno had told him
about this place. An apartment in a back house on its
66
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
own. Lots of other apartments in the house are still
empty but there's some Irish guy downstairs who's
supposed to be organising some people to move into
the ones down there. And there's this woman with a
baby who's doing up the one opposite.
He takes a slug from his bottle. It's been thirsty
work.
Big Bruno starts fiddling with the tape player.
A woman with frizzy short hair, blond, blue saucer-
eyes in a round smiling face, with a baby on her
back, appears in the doorway.
"Hi, L m Kalypso," she introduces herself. "From
opposite. Your new neighbour. Or will be when 1
move in. I've already painted the place. I hope to
move my stuff in tomorrow or the day after. And this
is Froschchen." She means the baby. 38
"Want a beer?"
"I'm breastfeeding."
"It'll help make a man of him."
"It's a her."
"Then it'll put hair on her chest.”
"You win."
Schreiner opens another Schu ItheiB, this time with the
opener he has permanently hanging from the waist of his
leather trousers and hands it to her.
"So the forces of law and order made an appearance
down your way yesterday," Big Bruno says out of the
blue. "There was an article in the taz."
Kalypso's been living in the OranienstraBe in
Kreuzberg 36.
"From the look of them in the photo they were big
Froschchen - little frog.
67
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
bastards," he adds.
"What happened?" Schreiner asks.
Kalypso gets in first.
"One of the houses was searched - by Zivis wearing
ski masks and carrying those baseball-bat batons. We
thought they were Faschos at first but there were
uniformed Bullen there too, and when I saw them
chatting away to each other it clicked. They were
trying to look like what they imagine your BILD-
Zeitung Chaot looks like. But their leather jackets
were too new, and the ironed jeans were a dead give¬
away. Some of them even had no-brain ads on their
T-shirts."
"They're all fascist pigs," Schreiner says.
"Only doing their job,” Big Bruno laughs.
"Their manner was enough to make you vomit,"
Kalypso continues. "Disgusting. A blatant display of
macho power. You could just see that they couldn't
give a shit. No wonder people throw stones at them!
Nothing happened though. They didn't find anything
or arrest anyone."
Big Bruno is still fiddling with the tape player.
"1 think I’ve done it," he says and suddenly a
deafening roar from the speakers shakes the room.
The sound of Crass.
middle class, working class, it's all a load of shit
middle class, working class, it's all a load of shit
Froschchen begins to bawl.
"Did I cause that?" Big Bruno laughs, turning down
the volume.
"Maybe, but she's probably hungry too."
68
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Waiting, waiting in their silos across the world,
thousands of them, their precise seductive insignia
stencilled onto their smooth hulls. Buttons are
pressed. Missiles glide through the sky, towards
cities, carrying payloads of mega-death.
The naked force of it tears Tina from her dream.
The original roar gives way to another. Thunder.
She is sweating.
If it had been she wouldn't have heard the blast
anyway.
It is raining. The sound of its freshness falling on
dry buildings and its splashing against the window
panes is reassuring.
But it could have been.
She wonders if many have dreams like that.
Dread is suggesting they declare Kreuzberg
independent: ”... build a wall around it, print our own
money. Machine-gun posts, barbed wire, the lot. The
tourists would come in droves. Make them change
their hard-earned West German marks for our own
equivalent just like they do on the Other Side.”
He, Horse and Our Hero are in Spectrum again.
"Wouldn't be that difficult. The place is half-
surrounded by the Wall anyway. And think of all the
cushy jobs! Embassies around the globe. The Embassy
of the Anarchist Republic of Kreuzberg. 1 can see it
inscribed on a brass plaque on some tasteful Georgian
building in London. And fleets of rainbow-coloured
limousines with little red and black flags fluttering on
their bonnets. Our own passports - in two languages,
Szenedeutsch and Turkish - black print on red pages.
The possibilities are endless!"
69
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The place is packed. Smelling of beer, sweat and
smoke.
"I'd like the Jamaica posting. A veranda overlooking
the beach. Pleasant sea breeze taking the worst of the
heat out of the tropical evening. A joint in one hand -
one from the embassy plantation naturlich - an iced
rum and coke in the other. The stereo blasting out Bob
Marley and on the horizon the mushroom clouds
blooming. Their 'terrible beauty' being reflected on the
mirror of the tropical sea." 39
He empties his glass.
Horse takes the hint and heads to the crowded bar.
It's been a good day. They've finally settled a
publication date for the Magazine.
Horse returns five minutes later with three sparkling
point-four litre glasses of beer.
"To the Anarchist Republic!" he toasts. "Na
zdorovje!"
Tina pedals through the quiet Saturday afternoon
streets, the warm air cool on her bare legs, gliding in
and out of the shadows of the trees along the
glimmering polluted canal, heading in the general
direction of Kreuzberg 36.
She passes the bricked-up Frankelufer houses.
She reaches Kottbusser Tor. A train screeches to a
halt in the overhead U-Bahn station. A banner hangs
from the walkway across AdalbertstraBe. The big red
words are in Turkish but she can make it out: DOWN
39 In his poem Easter, 1916, about the Irish 1916
uprising in Dublin, which started on an Easter Monday,
W B Yeats wrote, describing the events, 'a terrible
beauty is born'.
70
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
WITH THE JUNTA! The Wall is visible at the end of
the street. The Berliner Bank windows are boarded up.
They've been smashed so many times they've given up
replacing them.
The tourist buses don't venture this far. This is a
slum, a ghetto to the average Berliner. Kebab
takeaways. Turkish shops. The spicy whiff of the
Orient in the air. Big Turk-driven second-hand cars.
Half the graffiti and posters on house walls in an alien
and incomprehensible tongue. Old men with worry
beads. Women and girls wearing multicoloured head
scarves. Groups of young men in blue jeans smoking
Marlboros on street corners.
And alongside this, as Fehlfarben put it, are 'die
Tiirken von morgen', tomorrow's Turks: the Besetzer,
the youth, the losers. Defiant banners hang from the
windows of the squatted houses. Groups of Punks sit
on the pavement drinking cheap beer from Aldi. Up
nearer the Wall, at the quieter end of the street, a
group of hippyish-studenty types have set up a table
and chairs in a commandeered parking space and are
drinking wine from glasses and eating bread and
cheese.
It’s here that the Senate's regeneration policies have
hit the hardest. Whole blocks have been demolished.
Owners are leaving houses, both empty and occupied,
to rot. A rotting house gets a demolition permit,
building land fetches a high price and rents on newly
built apartments aren't subject to 'archaic' restrictions.
The low rents draw the Turks because they can't
afford more, aren't wanted elsewhere and if they hope
to save enough to one day return in dignity to their
homeland, it might at least be possible here. 'Kebab-
71
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Traume in der Mauerstadt', kebab-dreams in the Wall-
city, another Fehlfarben line. On some streets every
second house is squatted.
Coasting down a side street, she finds herself
approaching a crowd, the sound of live music, the
smell of meat barbecuing over charcoal. She
dismounts and chains her bike to a lamp-post. It's a
street party.
There are stalls on both sides of the street: sellers of
home-made cakes, the German-Turkish solidarity
group, the local tenants' association, free face¬
painting for children, handmade jewellery, an info-
stall by one of the more together squatted houses. She
buys a plastic cup of Riesling from a couple selling
wine. On a makeshift stage on the back of a lorry a
Turkish folklore troupe in traditional costumes is
dancing, the oriental music and the pounding of their
boots on the stage timbers echoes down the street.
She sees Dmitri, but he - Gott sei Dank 40 - does not
notice her. He's sitting on the pavement, pissed as
usual, engaged in a shouting match with a group of
Punks.
Further down, a crowd has gathered around
something. It's a performance by a street theatre
group. The evil trinity of speculator, politician and
Bulle are seeing the error of their ways and begging
forgiveness from the people, represented by a sweet
smiling Punk and a bearded hippy with flowers in his
hair, a too-big-to-be-true joint in one hand and a
regulation-issue anarchist spherical black bomb in the
other.
40 Gott sei Dank - Thank God!
72
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
She lingers at a book stall. Most of the books are
pirated black and white prints of expensive full-colour
volumes, the rest obscure political tracts. One catches
her eye: a black bible-like tome sporting the red
machine-gun insignia of the RAF. She picks it up,
drawn by the paradox. It's a collection of position
papers and declarations, press releases, interviews. She
flicks through it. The Marxist terminology has a bold
certainty about it. It dawns on her how little she really
knows about the Rote Armee Fraktion. She'd been in
secondary school at the time. The time of the wanted
posters in the baker's and the butcher's. The time of the
crossing-out of the young faces whenever one of them
was caught - or shot dead. The time of the Schleyer
kidnapping and Mogadishu and the convenient suicides
in Stammheim. But these days the posters are confined
to police stations and post offices. It costs eight marks.
She forgets about it the minute she pops it into her
shoulder bag.
A blast of incomprehensible Punk crashes over the
PA. She heads towards the stage, buying another
Riesling on the way.
"What brings you to this part of the world?" Tina
asks, pouring the aromatic Earl Grey. Justine's visit
is unexpected.
"1 had to collect some papers from my old
employers, the Arbeiterwohlfahrt."
The Arbeiterwohlfahrt is a charity which provides
home help for pensioners.
"Sugar?"
"One please!"
"What's the work like?"
73
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Depends on who you get. Some of them just give
you the shopping list and the money and let you get
on with it. Others mainly just want someone to talk
to. Sad really. Not their being old. It's something else
...an air about them that my grandparents don't have.
They live in a village near Orleans. They're
cantankerous old fogeys. He's a drinker and calls
himself a Bonapartist. She's tells him she votes
Communist to wind him up - and probably does."
Tina's paternal grandparents had disappeared in East
Prussia in 1945. Her mother's parents were smug,
intolerant and churchgoing, as if nothing even slightly
odd had ever happened in Germany or as if it had all
been something of a bit of a mishap best not
mentioned. Her father been about eighteen when the
war started and spent it in the navy. She had no idea
what her mother had done.
Justine lights a filtered Gitane.
"I had four regulars. One old guy - a Herr Marx - used
to insist on showing me this photograph of himself as a
young man in some ill-fitting Wehrmacht corporal's
uniform. And then he'd tell me about when he was in
France - totally oblivious to the possibility that I might
have had family who'd been killed by the army he'd
been in. He was stationed at a customs post in the
Pyrenees and he used to tell me how one day they all
got drunk on some Calvados some gendarmes gave
them. He used to go on and on about it, as if that bottle
of Calvados had been the high point of his life, the
essence of his youth. Once he actually muttered
something about Russia, where they sent him in the
end, but all I ever got out of him was that it was very
74
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
big and very cold."
"Can I nick one of those?"
Justine hands her the blue Gitanes packet.
"The war always comes up. 1 thought my being
French was the reason for it. Sometimes, at first, they
thought 1 was Polish - what with my name - but when
they discovered 1 was French they would talk.
"There was also a Herr Zimmermann. He insisted 1
call him Frederick. He used to buy me chocolates and
offer me drinks. After about the third visit he started
going on about how a man needed a woman - even an
old gentleman like his good self, and perhaps if 1
couldn't be nice to him in that way perhaps 1 had a
friend who would. You French understand these
things, he used to say."
"What were the women like?"
"One had lost her husband in Russia, at Stalingrad,
and had lived alone since. Her father and one of her
brothers had died in the east too. But she didn't seem
bitter about it. She was the nicest of them. After the
war she'd spent twenty years working at Siemens.
Empty Jagermeister bottles all over the place."
"Any others?"
"One other, a Frau 'von' Bollendorf. Her husband
had been 'ein Offizier' and been shot by the Russians
... after the war, I think he was captured ... and she
was bitter. They'd had land in Poland or what's Poland
now until 'the Reds' had stolen it from them."
"Well, that's fucking Deutschland for you," Tina
says.
German self-hatred always struck Justine as being
particularly vehement and deep-rooted.
75
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"So many things are hidden here," Tina says,
"especially things that have to do with the war and the
past. Everything is clean on the outside, but you dig a
bit ... something ugly always turns up."
76
9
"Ah, the familiar sweet sickly smell Our Hero
says, about to inhale deeply.
"Saw a massive one the other day," Horse says,
sipping from his glass of cheap Aldi red. "Up by the
Wall. It was spread over the two gable-ends of some
big buildings. It was two paintings really, I suppose."
Our Hero exhales.
"Of?"
"The spirit of the times, 1 guess. The first one was of
three witches-cum-anarchists around a bubbling
cauldron, like in Macbeth, with cartoon-anarchist
bombs bubbling out of it, and thunder and lightning,
with one of the thunderbolts in a circle making a
gigantic Besetzer symbol. The bombs were turning
into bubbles and floating up into the air, floating
above this ugly-looking norm family sitting in a pile
of rubbish - broken television sets, dishwashers,
consumer detritus. One of the bubbles had '68 written
on it and it had burst. There was also one with '81.
Even cynical me was impressed!"
"That’s the KuKuCK. K-U-K-U-C-K. Kreuzberger
Kunst und Kultur Zentrum.”
"Besetzt?" 41
"Yeah! And recently raided by 400 Bullen.”
Horse pours some more Aldi red.
Squatted, more literally 'occupied'.
77
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"How's life with Dread these days?"
"Claustrophobic!"
"All we have to do is knock down the walls. Here, 1
think there's a bit left in this.”
Our Hero passes him what's left of the joint.
Horse takes a probing toke.
"Nah, it's dead. But I have plenty more.”
"It's getting one over on them - but the hassle, the
possibly unnecessary hassle?"
"Fuck the hassle," Our Hero does a John Wayne
impression, "A man's got to do what a man's got to
do!"
"True enough."
"I'm sick of talking, of eternal yapping about
alternatives and all that. I want to do something for a
fucking change. I'm tired of the yap-yap-yap."
"Do what thou wilt!"
"Shall be the whole of the Law."
"And Love is the Law."
"Love under Will." 42
Two days later, Our Hero, naked from the waist up, in
shorts cut from an ancient pair of Levis and shod in a
pair of worn-out gym shoes, takes the first
sledgehammer swing at the bricked-up arch in the
kitchen. His first blows are timid. But immediately a
hole appears and he can see through it, so he lets go,
belting bricks right out of the wall and into the
apartment beyond amidst tumbling rubble and rising
dust.
It takes about five minutes to break through
Aleister Crowley.
78
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
completely.
He climbs over the rubble and through the dust into
the empty apartment on the other side.
He's done it. He's fucking well done it. He does a hip-
hop and laughs aloud at the thought of it.
He sits down on the floorboards and rolls a ciggie. He
intends to savour the moment, magically draw it into
him with the smoke.
He wipes the grime and the dust from his sweat-
drenched forehead with the back of his hand. He feels
good.
Through the archway the kitchen of his old apartment
is visible through the rubble and dust. It seems in a
different world, one he's consigned to the past.
The roll-up becomes a butt. He stubs it out and gets
up.
The other wall, a partition of wood, straw and plaster,
is a messier job and takes twice as long to dismantle.
He sprinkles it with water several times to keep the
dust down.
Just as he is about to finish he hears footsteps outside
and stops, suddenly conscious of the racket he's been
making.
Schreiner's curious face peeps around the door.
"You look like the madman in that Themroc film!"
He's carrying a six-pack.
"Direct action to create additional living space. A
beer would go down nicely."
Schreiner obliges.
"I'm surprised the old geezer above hasn't been down
to complain," Schreiner says, referring to Herr Marx.
"You could feel the vibrations up on the third floor."
"He went out earlier. He's okay. I can handle him.
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It's the old woman on the fourth floor you have to
look out for. She's completely off her head!"
"She waylaid me on the stairs the other day and said
she'd heard that there were Besetzer in the house, and
had I seen any?"
There's a knock on the door. Polite but firm. They
both freeze.
"Who is it?" Our Hero shouts.
A hesitant female voice answers.
"My name is Justine."
"Come in," Our Hero shouts, adding unnecessarily
that the door is open. "We're in here. To your right.”
She clambers over the rubble looking as if she
doesn't know what she's walking into, which is
exactly how she feels.
Our Hero is sure he's seen her before somewhere.
"Tina said she spoke to you."
"Ah, you're the French woman who might be
interested in one of the apartments.”
She nods, her dark round eyes beaming.
"Have we met somewhere?" Our Hero asks.
"I used to visit the pensioner upstairs last winter. 1
was working for the Arbeiterwohlfahrt."
Our Hero explains the situation. Schreiner listens in
silence, following them around as Our Hero gives her
a guided tour. Eventually they come to the one
remaining free apartment. The door is open.
"There was no key, so we had to break the lock.”
They go in.
"ScheiBBBBe!" Schreiner breaks his silence.
The place stinks, as well as being full of junk: rotten
armchairs and sofa, two mouldy mattresses, fungus on
the wall under the windows, and where the oven
80
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should be there’s only a hole in the wall to the
chimney.
"It looks worse than it really is," Our Hero says. "If
the others are agreed, you can have it - if you want it.
We'll help you fix it up.”
Justine gives him a quick grimace of a smile.
Our Hero spends the first night in the eerily empty
apartments alone, waking up shortly after dawn to the
sound of police sirens. He doesn't get back to sleep
again. Paranoia. Paranoia.
GeWoBag, the owners, turn up the next day. Herr
Marx, when he saw Our Hero and Schreiner bringing
the rubble out in an old tin bathtub, had gone straight
to the office down the street and told them that their
tenant, the Herr Irishman, was knocking their house
down. A foreman and a clerk had come to see what is
happening and inspect the alterations. When they asked
him who did he think he was, Our Hero tells them the
apartments are now 'officially' besetzt and if they didn't
like that, it was their problem - and their fault for
leaving the places empty. They leave saying that this is
not the last he is going to hear from them. Herr Marx
appears later and gives him a present of a bottle of Aldi
champagne - saying he hopes there are no bad feelings.
The next few days are confusion, chaos, anarchy,
things being done and undone. There's more rubble to
be moved, walls plastered, broken window panes
replaced, walls whitewashed, floors painted and
electricity connected up. Beer, grass, coffee, tea and
tobacco are consumed in unhealthy quantities. They
even manage to transplant Horse's grass plants to the
neglected excuse for a garden out the back.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Tina paints her room in a day, the walls white, the
floorboards in a yellow-black chess board pattern. The
following day, with the help of Schreiner, over a bottle
of Intershop Gordon's Dry Gin and a carton of Aldi
orange juice - of which Schreiner drinks more than the
lion's share - they put in a high bed made from reused
wood.
Horse begins sleeping there a few days later, on the
couch in Our Hero's room at first. Each day brings
more people to breakfast with it: Tina, Big Bruno. And
the evening meals more again: Schreiner, Kalypso,
Justine, others.
One morning at about two, Our Hero and Horse
stagger back from Godot, shouting, thinking they are
singing:
Deutschland, Deutschland alles ist vorbei!
Deutschland, Deutschland, all is forebye! 43
Kalypso is furious at them the next morning and lets
them know it. They'd woken Froschchen up. And the
rest of the house, Big Bruno adds.
"I read your stories," Horse says.
The window is open but a smell of fresh paint hangs
in the air. Our Hero has just finished painting the
round table a gaudy yellow. It's the room's centre
piece.
One of Dread's reggae tapes is playing.
"Und?"
"Why SF?"
"Because we live in a science fiction world.
43 alles ist vorbei! - it's all over!
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Everything is possible, from Utopia - if the aliens land
ti
"Or there's a world revolution.”
"... to 1984 to Armageddon. The last at the pressing
of a button. Maybe it's a sort of reaction to NO
FUTURE, not the Punk variety, the other one, the real
No Futurists: the Ronnies and the Maggies, the CDU
and Fine Gael 44 voters, the ones who can't see any
future beyond their wallets and their mortgages and
have the power to make their fantasies real for the rest
of us. Or rather their lack of fantasy. Or any kind of
imagination.”
"I liked The Last Battle."
The Last Battle, set in the icy vacuum beyond Pluto's
orbit, is about two computer-controlled spaceships, one
American and one Soviet, their crews in suspended
animation, heading away from a nuke-charred dead Earth
towards the nearest habitable planet some twenty light
years distant. Both ships are computer-programmed to
destroy each other.
"Doris Eessing's first stuff used to be totally
straight. Then SF crept in, as if the things she wanted
to write about couldn't be written about straight.
You've read ShikastaT
It's a bit of a cult book that year.
"An interesting literary exercise. But the idea that
there’s some fucking aliens out there keeping some
sort of benevolent eye on us is wishful thinking."
"Or our only hope?”
"Redemption shall come from on high. A Second
Coming in the form of flying saucers. Send out our
44 Irish political party.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
radio messages and pray some fucker is listening."
The tape comes to an end. Horse turns it over.
"Put it down for a second," Our Hero gasps.
They put the couch down on the pavement. It's one
of those ones that opens out flat and can be used as a
bed. They've just carried it down three flights of
narrow stairs.
The street is hot after the cool of the courtyard.
"Don't you already have one of these?" Schreiner
says. "One exactly the same?"
"I want to put the two of them together and have a
decent-sized bed. My love life requires it."
Schreiner raises his eyes to the gods.
They start off again.
The sound of the royal fucking wedding - of Charles
and fucking Di - being broadcast live to the whole
fucking planet from Saint Paul's Cathedral, or
Westminster Abbey or wherever it is, is creeping
eerily out of several windows along the street.
Schreiner: "ScheiBe, half of Europe must be
watching that fucking thing."
"A simple girl of the people is becoming a princess,"
Our Hero taunts him. "Like in a fairy tale come true.
Your Teutonic heart must be as hard as Krupp steel."
"As tender as leather."
They begin to cross Chamissoplatz.
Children, German and Turkish, are playing in the
sand pits. Dmitri is sitting with someone at one of the
rough wooden tables, a bottle of Aldi red and two
glasses in front of them. He waves.
Tina and Big Bruno are playing table tennis.
They reach number 11. Schreiner pushes the heavy
84
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
front door open and they manoeuvre the couch into
the courtyard. The white reggae sound of UB40 blares
from the open window of the common room. Horse is
sitting on the window sill, smoking a joint.
He hands the joint to Our Hero who takes a quick
toke from it. He makes to pass it on but Schreiner
shakes his head.
"I smoke not hashish,” Schreiner says, changing to
English. "I also once take a lot of heroin but for six
months now 1 am clean. 1 take no drugs."
"Except alcohol," Horse says.
"That is different!"
"It was a fucking laugh. Outside one mansion the
loudspeaker van informed us authoritatively that it was
the villa of anti-social and evil speculator pig so-and-so
who owned such-and-such a house in Kreuzberg.
Needless to say, an announcement followed by a
barrage of boos and paint bombs, but it stopped
abruptly when the woman in the van started informing
us that there'd been a bit of a mistake, that it wasn't this
house, that it was the one next door. She'd mixed up
the house numbers."
Big Bruno is in Tina's room telling her about Sunday
afternoon's stroll by Besetzer around plush wooded
haute bourgeois Grunewald. The BZ , splendidly
outraged, had carried the story of a 'young' policeman
being relieved of his trousers and pistol by the mob on
its front page the next day.
"We came across a South African consulate or
something which nobody'd known was on the route.
Needless to say again, that got the treatment too. In the
end the Bullen used tear gas to disperse us, but that
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
only spread us out and made it more difficult for them
to control us.”
Clouds of tear gas wafting over the idyllic villa
suburb of the Grunewald! Kreuzberg has being putting
up with it for months. It was good to see the real
bastards, not just their lackeys the Bullen, getting a
taste of their own medicine.
Interview published in the Magazine:
How did you originally get involved in squatting?
Wilde: Through the Chamisso Tenants' Centre
initially. I've lived in this area for years and have been
involved in various projects. For example, we
catalogued the number of empty apartments in the
Kiez 45 as part of a city-wide survey by the Berlin
Tenant's Union. We counted at least 10,000 empty
apartments in the city. The idea was to get something
done for underprivileged groups: migrant worker
families, single women with children. The migrant
workers were in a situation in which they could do
very little for themselves. A lot of them have been
living in squalid conditions for years. We had
discussions with the Senate but nothing happened -
despite the press coverage. We got a lot of verbal
concessions and we thought we had made some
progress. But we were wrong. Nothing really positive
was achieved by it all.
How did the squatting start?
Wilde: Places have been squatted for the last five
years. Just before Christmas several houses - in the
worst slum clearance area in the east of Kreuzberg -
45 Neighbourhood.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
were evicted. There was a big demonstration on the
Ku'damm. The police broke that up quite savagely.
That led to the first militant resistance on the streets.
At about the same time another building scandal hit
the news. The so-called Garski Affair. The Senate
ended up losing a hundred million marks of public
funds. Heads had to roll, in particular that of the
mayor. Hans-Joachim Vogel was sent from Bonn to
take his place and prepare for the May elections. This
created a kind of power vacuum, a breathing space
that various groups and organisations involved in the
housing issue used to occupy more empty houses and
highlight the general housing situation. The Public
Prosecutor's Office and the police wanted to move
against them but Vogel needed a quiet city for the
elections, and generally the squatters had the support
of the Left of the SPD. Before anyone knew what was
happening the situation acquired its own momentum.
Other groups looking for a free living space - space
under their own control - joined in. Soon houses were
being occupied at the rate of one a day. The
authorities had been caught off guard. The police
reacted with searches. The squatters' answer to that
was resistance on the streets. The squatting
movement, in part, has its roots in the student revolt
of '68. The Alternative Liste also has its roots there.
What kind of people are involved?
Wilde: 1 can only tell you about the people around
here, where about nineteen houses are occupied.
Students and a fair sprinkling of unemployed and
younger people. There are also a few older people
who have been active for a long time. And there's also
the so-called militant fringe, kids who are to some
87
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
extent a bit disorientated. My experience with the
Punks for instance: they are in some ways very naive,
which is disconcerting at times, but behind the facade
and the language 1 have found them to be really nice
people. In general, most of those involved are young,
intellectual, and politically aware.
How long have you been in this house?
Wilde: Since the beginning of the year. We occupied
the three empty apartments in the front house first.
Later we opened up apartments in the back house.
There are rent-paying tenants living in the house,
which can be both an advantage and a disadvantage.
They have a different attitude to property. Maybe that
keeps our feet on the ground. But it can be difficult to
do things in the house. In houses in which there are
only squatters the people tend to look on the house as
their own and have put a lot of work into changing the
interiors and renovating them. They have things like
communal workshops. Squatting is not just concerned
with housing, it's also about alternative ways of
living.
How have the tenants and your neighbours reacted?
Wilde: Fairly mixed. It can be difficult to overcome
suspicions. But after a few weeks some tenants were
coming by with old carpets and furniture. We
organised discussions. At first we didn't have much
response. We tried to explain the so-called
modernisation plans and how the tenants themselves
were affected by them. We put tables on the pavement
and invited the people to coffee and cakes and tried to
explain why we were squatting. Sometimes it was
good and we could really talk with them, but a lot of
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
people still remained cautious, especially because of
the association between squatting and violence.
And the Senate?
Wilde: When Vogel took over as mayor he
developed a policy involving negotiations with the
squatters, but from the start we were not prepared to
negotiate while people who had supported us on the
streets were still in jail. That is still the case.
Nevertheless, discussions have taken place through
third parties. From very early on the Senate has being
trying to divide the movement, into houses which
would negotiate and houses which would not. Looking
back on it now, it seems that this was a deliberate
tactic to split the movement. During all this searches
and evictions continued, very often on the initiative of
the police, who wanted to show that they had the
upper hand.
The police have searched a lot of houses?
Wilde: Yes. They come very early in the morning
and people are hardly ever prepared for them. They've
wrecked some of the places they've been into. The
squatters have to produce their identity cards and are
photographed. Sometimes they are taken to one of the
larger police stations to be questioned and have their
fingerprints taken. In most cases they are charged with
criminal trespass, sometimes with resisting arrest, and
with stealing gas and electricity, and even water. In
some cases too they've been charged under Paragraph
129a, the conspiracy section of the Anti-Terrorist Laws
introduced to combat the RAF.
And support from the general public for the
squatters?
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Wilde: There is a basic sympathy but it is hard to
define. Lots of people, especially in an area like this, at
some time or another have had trouble with landlords,
with the rents going up, with the neglect of the houses,
and especially with the problem of actually getting an
apartment. But because of the press coverage, the
police provocation, and the form of resistance the
squatters have adopted, this sympathy has ebbed. The
Springer Press, which controls 80% of the newspapers,
has tried to isolate and criminalise the squatters as
Chaoten and Radikale. There has been no real
discussion in the establishment media of the problems
behind the squatting, and no understanding of why
people are going out onto the streets and smashing the
windows of banks and insurance companies.
Doesn't the violence alienate people?
Wilde: I call it counter-violence. We decided we must
always react to the searches and the evictions, to the
sort of thing that happened at the beginning of the year
when the whole of the Squatters Council was arrested
under Paragraph 129a. We can't just let that happen. If
we did, they'd be breaking down this door tomorrow
and we'd be out on the street. There must always be a
political reaction to these attacks. Much of this has
been directed into this counter-violence. The original
violence is the organised violence of the police and
the state. If there were no searches or evictions - and a
political solution to the whole problem was being
discussed with us - there would be no need for it.
People don't go out onto the street and risk prison
sentences for fun. They do it to protect what they've
achieved over the last six months. As for it alienating
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
people: that is true. But the press will always be
against us, no matter what we do.
And the future?
Wilde: If it comes to a mass eviction, there will be a
mass reaction. The Senate knows that. The new mayor
knows that. In the long run the CDU may try and evict
all the houses. And if there's no resistance they will
be able to do that.
Anything to acid?
Wilde: Yes. The imagination and the work that goes
on in the houses. Squatting is not just sitting on your
backside and doing nothing. There is fantastic
potential in the houses. It would be a pity to see it
destroyed by this mindless repression. In many ways
the houses are like small plants. In the right
conditions they will start to grow and a lot will come
out of them. But if you keep tearing them and
withholding water, you destroy them. In the houses a
lot of people are trying to be creative and sensitive
towards their environment, but when there is
continuous violence from outside, they become nervous
and edgy, and maybe in the long run very resigned. The
last few months have shown us that nothing has
changed with regard to the Senate's housing policy.
Luxury apartments and huge profits are more important
than people's needs. There's life in the houses now.
Courtyards have been cleaned up and painted. Gardens
have been planted.
91
10
The pool of liquid fire the petrol bomb has splattered
across Martin-Luther-StraBe is belching black smoke.
The massive demo had started peacefully, its
destination Rathaus Schoneberg. Twenty minutes later
the first teargas canisters were being lobbed into the air
over the crowd and the demonstrators had begun to
disperse. Horse has never seen a riot before or been in
one. It's different from what he had imagined.
Tina runs with the crowd, teargas canisters hissing
through the air, landing clattering and bouncing along
the street behind them.
"Keine Panik!" people are shouting, "Don't panic!"
The crowd slows down.
The far end of the street is engulfed in a white cloud
of pungent-smelling gas that hangs motionless in the
still afternoon heat.
They move slowly on, more a group now than a
crowd, away from the gas and God knows how many
Bullen on the other side of it. There's about fifty of
them. Not many. But there are countless groups like
them in the streets all around.
She hears the sound of breaking glass.
Somebody is screaming: "Are you crazy?"
She turns around.
Joschka is pelting stone after stone into the glass
facade of the building opposite.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"It's a fucking police station,” someone shouts.
A guy is prising cobblestones out of the pavement
with a screwdriver. Some people start to run. Others
help themselves to the cobblestones and throw them at
the building, punching jagged holes in the semi¬
opaque glass panes of the checkerboard facade.
She makes a split-second decision, grabs a stone and
flings it. It hits the glass but bounces back. Her
second shot doesn't. It cracks the glass of an already
cracked window. She grabs another, flings that and
moves further up the street.
A mass of olive-green uniforms, too many to be
counted, in white helmets and carrying shields, are
suddenly visible running down a stairs behind the
facade, ducking the stones that are peppering it. She
gets one more stone in, but doesn't wait to see where
it hits.
"Champagne fur das Proletariat!" Dread is shouting,
waving a bottle of it about. "Champagne for the
proletariat! Champagne for the masses!"
The windows of the Bolle supermarket have been
smashed. Crates of beer, schnapps and champagne are
being looted. The corks are popping. Sweet German
champagne is spurting all over the place.
Dread takes a long deep slug of the sparkling vino.
"Nothing like the smell of tear gas in the morning."
It's great to see people cutting loose like this,
absolutely fucking great.
Wilde is breathless. Twice they've made their way up
the street that leads onto John-F-Kennedy-Platz and
the Rathaus, and twice they've been chased back down
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
it again by baton charges. Several people have been
hit, one badly, and someone has been arrested.
This is more or less the front line.
He pulls his scarf down, hoping to be able to breathe
more freely, but it's not much use. The tear gas is
everywhere. He cough-spits several times in an
attempt to clear his lungs. His head is beginning to
ache.
On John-F-Kennedy-Platz the Bullen are getting into
position in front of the barriers again. They have
withdrawn, obviously too overstretched to follow up
the baton charges they've made. Which means that
they can have another go at the bastards. People are
digging up more cobblestones.
Most of those around him seem to know what they
are doing. Which is reassuring. Innocent bystanders
always seem to end up getting more badly beaten than
the activists. Despite the masks and the scarves, he
half-recognises some of them - people he knows by
sight from around the place.
"We need to build a fucking barricade,” one guy is
saying. "If they drive down here in their transits we're
fucked."
"Those builders' wagons up there should do the job
nicely," Wilde says.
The crowd makes its way up towards the Rathaus
slowly, digging up more cobblestones on the way,
scattering them over the street - for future use.
A woman with a black spray can is graffiting every
bit of spare wall she can find:
leben-lieben-lachen! 46
46 Living, loving, laughing!
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
legal -illegal-scheiBegal!
macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht ! 47
She signs off with a generous sprinkling of
anarchist 'A's in circles and Besetzer signs.
People move the builders' wagon into the centre of
the street and after a few heaves manage to overturn
it. Wilde joins in. It tips over with a smash.
Splash!
A shower of water splatters over the pavement and
some parked cars. Wilde looks up.
"Pigs, dirty fucking pigs, they should beat you all
to fucking death,” an unshaven beer-bellied hulk
with a plastic bucket is yelling down at them from a
balcony.
Wilde gives him the finger and yells a stream of
obscenities back up.
They advance further, overturning another builders'
wagon as they do so.
They get to within fifty metres of the Bullen.
An order is barked.
The Bullen form themselves into a phalanx and
start to move forward, beating their shields with their
batons.
Wilde begins grabbing cobblestones, stuffing them
into the pockets of his leather jacket. Everyone does.
Then they rush forward towards the marching
Bullen screaming war cries.
They come within of range of the massed shields.
The hail of granite bounces off the wall of perspex
and stops the Bullen in their tracks. Another volley
47 Make kaput what makes you kaput!
95
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
nails them down, but then there's a crack and a teargas
canister hisses through the air, heading straight down
into them. Seconds later another one follows.
Shit, Wilde says to himself, about to turn and run ...
everything now is in adrenalin-induced slow motion ...
but this guy in a ski mask and wearing heavy duty
industrial gloves has suddenly appeared and is picking
up the smoking hot metal canister. He flings it back at
the Bullen, then grabs the other one and seemingly
effortlessly dispatches that too in the same direction.
Both land short of the phalanx, but they stop it
advancing. Another hail of cobblestones presses the
advantage home.
"Go for their fucking legs!" a tall blond guy,
maskless, is screaming. His accent is East European.
He is bowling cobblestones along the ground, aiming
for the Bullen's unprotected shins beneath their shields.
A Bulle crumples over and is swallowed by the
protective shields of his comrades.
"That's the way we do it in Hungary," he says.
Suddenly, to the right of the phalanx there are three
flashes, followed by the familiar cracks of the teargas
guns firing, but this time not aimed up to land in the
middle of them, but on a trajectory that at its highest
point is little more than a foot above their heads. The
scalding chemical-packed canisters zap right into them.
One hits a parked car, bounces off it, missing Wilde by
centimetres.
He turns and runs, his eyes on fire. Others are doing
the same. It's panic. If someone trips he'll trip over
them and someone'll trip over him. He forces his eyes
open to scan the ground in front of him, passing the
guy with the gloves picking up another one of the
96
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
canisters and throwing it back. Just when he thought he
never would, he emerges from the gas and there in
front of him is the overturned builder's wagon. Once
behind it someone hands him a plastic lemon and he
squirts the acidic juice straight into his eyes. The
effect is immediate. He can see again. They haven't
been beaten yet.
"There's Justine," Horse says.
Our Hero looks up and sees her come in through the
glass doors.
He and Horse have escaped into Niemandsland and
decided to take refuge in each other's company and
alcohol.
She throws her camera onto the table.
"Have you seen Tina?” Our Hero asks.
"About half an hour ago," she says in English, "She
was on Winterfeldtplatz with some guy she knows."
"Any good photographs?" Horse asks.
"Maybe."
The crowd on the street outside makes a sudden
movement. Our Hero gets up and goes out to
investigate.
"Anything happening?" Horse asks him when he
comes back in.
Our Hero shakes his head.
"They could pick up a thing or two in West
Belfast!" Horse says. "Half of the bods can't seem to
make up their mind whether they're rioting or
demonstrating."
"And what did you do during the revolution?" Our
Hero says, sarcastically quoting a line from a cartoon
in the copy of An Phoblacht he'd picked up at Dread's.
97
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Oh, I supported it totally. 1 was all for it. Can't
remember the number of times 1 spoke out for it in
this very pub!" 48
"I'm going to the bar," Justine says.
While Horse is counting out some money Dread
barges in.
"You lot have been missing the crack," he says,
barely keeping a damper on his enthusiasm, taking a
precautionary look around the place, before giving
them a quick glimpse of the bottle of Russian vodka
he's hidden inside his donkey jacket.
"Confiscated, comrades. In the name of the people!”
"Bullen are Bullen, East or West," the Hungarian is
saying. "When I left Hungary I went to Bavaria. They
gave me three months to get out. That's how I ended
up here. The two things I hate most are police and
borders - and armies. That's how I got into trouble in
the first place. I didn't want to do military service and
protect the sacred Hungarian fatherland. I believe in
socialism, democratic socialism, not the 'real existing'
crap they have on the other side of the Wall. Do you
want a fag?" 49
Wilde takes one, a filterless Roth-Handle, strong.
An Phoblacht, Sinn Fein / IRA newspaper.
49 Officially the system on the Other Side is not
communism, but 'real existierender Sozialismus', real
existing socialism. The classless communist society
is to come later, and the state will 'wither away'
(Vladimir Lenin), or 'die off' (Friedrich Engels).
The ruling party in East Germany is the
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED),
officially a coalition of the Communist Party, the
Social Democrats and even Christian Democrats and
Liberals. Its West Berlin branch is called the
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Westberlins (SEW).
98
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The motionless cloud of tear gas still obscures the
end of the street. And the Bullen are undoubtedly at
the other side of it.
Wilde's eyes are glued to the white haze in case
there's any sudden movement. He'd actually been
there once. In Hungary ...
Everything happens simultaneously: the engine
revving, the flashing blue light, the white and green
transit emerging from the gas, screeching to a halt,
turning and blocking off the street when the driver
suddenly sees the overturned builder's wagon. Wilde
and the Hungarian spring into action with the others,
launching a hail of cobblestones that bounces off the
transit's metal sides and caged windscreen, forcing it
to turn and retreat. The stone throwers cheer.
The obvious thing to do now is to set the builder's
wagon on fire, and already a red-haired woman in a
leather jacket has climbed onto its side, smashed open
its flimsy windows and is stuffing burning newspapers
into it. Smoke begins to pour out of it and she jumps
down. Flames are leaping out of it when more transits
emerge out of the gas cloud, their back doors
slamming open as they screech to a halt.
The cobblestones begin to fly again. The din of them
battering the metal sides and roofs of the transits
sounds like a battery of drums being beaten in quick
succession.
The first teargas canister, shot from the relative
safety of behind a transit's open back doors, descends
into their midst. The second and third canisters land
behind them. If they don't run now they'll be trapped.
Wilde sees the first helmeted shield-bearing figures
appear from behind the vehicles as he turns to run and
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
hears another shot from the teargas gun. He moves as
fast as his legs will carry him. He gets thirty metres
before the whole street is completely engulfed in gas.
He begins to choke. He can't see. He trips over
something, his legs flinging out of control from under
him, and crashes onto the asphalt, sliding several
painful feet along the merciless surface under his own
momentum .
Suddenly he hears a Bulle's voice screaming down at
him.
"Got you now, you fucking bastard!"
The whack of a wooden baton across the side of his
neck finishes the sentence. It's followed by another
across his shoulders as he instinctively curls up and
wraps his hands around his skull.
"They've got someone," he hears someone shout
from somewhere.
A cobblestone suddenly hits the ground a few feet
from him. Another bounces off the Bulle's shield.
More follow. He curls up tighter. The Bulle moves
back but now the danger is from the badly aimed
sharp-edged lumps of rock landing all around him.
He hold his breath and waits an eternity for it to
stop.
At the first lull he's on his feet and heading towards
the builders' wagon, the pain in his back and neck
spreading to his chest and arms.
Tina and Joschka sit pressed against each other in the
packed U-Bahn. The carriage is too full for anything
but small talk.
There's something reassuring about him, she thinks.
He's comfortable to be with. In Heilbronn he was just
100
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
one of another crowd. He'd never even been a remote
possibility. But, now, after just a few hours wandering
the insurgent rubble-strewn streets with him, she isn't
just feeling attraction, she's feeling desire.
They change trains at Mehringdamn, go down the
escalator and wait on the platform. Neither of them
seem able to break the silence between them. She
wonders what he's feeling, thinking - if anything.
The train arrives. There's standing room only.
"My legs are killing me," he says, smiling, perhaps a
bit too innocently. They are about the same height.
"Mine too. Rioting is serious exercise."
She's thinking they'll be getting off at the next stop
and going their separate ways if she doesn't for once
take the initiative.
Wilde arrives back at his studio apartment sore and
shaking, wanting to be alone, drained yet awake, as if
he was coming down from a trip. He sips herb tea and
smokes in the dusk, somehow feeling that it would not
be right to turn on the light and play a tape and shut out
the transit sirens he can hear in the distance and what's
probably happening in Kreuzberg 36. His painting of
the demo cascading under the YorckstraBe bridges on
the easel, nearly finished now, is slowly becoming
invisible in the growing summer darkness. Like a
portent. But he's not given to such ways of thought.
He's gotten a bit of a beating, that's all, hadn't been fast
enough, probably getting too old for the game. But,
somehow, deep down, he knows it's not as simple as
that.
101
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Back in her room, over tea, Tina and Joschka talk for a
long time, both surprised at how much they have to say
to each other. Neither can quite believe what seems to
be happening between them.
Dread begins to run, alcohol and adrenaline pumping
through his brain, fleetingly aware of the other people
running with him and away from the sudden baton
charge. The image of the Sani he'd seen in the doorway
trying to help a guy literally soaking in the blood
streaming from his skull is fresh in his mind. The
shuttered-up shops on both sides of him speed by in the
darkness. Like in a film. Wondering where the others
are, he looks behind him ... Jesus fucking Christ! A
Bulle is almost on top of him. He puts on a burst of
speed. Swoosh! A long white hard thing, spinning and
slashing, summersaults through the air, misses him by
a hair's breadth, lands on the street, bouncing along in
front of him to the sound of wood on stone. The
bastard's thrown his fucking baton at him. As he passes
it he tries to bend down, drop his hand and pick it up,
but he's moving too fast. Damn! He runs on, gains
distance and reaches people who are not running and
knows he's safe.
He leans against some railings, his lungs aching. The
air is reeking of tear gas. He's run the full length of
OranienstraBe. He's wrecked, and there's still no sign of
the others.
They are kissing each other, their lips touching, their
tongues exploring, tasting each other. He's almost
timid. She had not expected that. It's nice, so nice and
102
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
so needed. Her softness, her desiring him, the warmth
of her awakens in him an intensity and quality of
tenderness and desire he had not expected.
They lie together on the deep cushions under her high
bed for a while, kissing, caressing, now gently, now
with more urgent desire, now simply gazing at each
others' reflections in each others' eyes.
"1 don't want us to screw," she says after some
hesitation "but I want you to spend the night here. I'm
not taking anything."
"I understand," he says and gives her a hug.
"Let's go up then," she said, indicating ladder to the
bed with an upward movement of her eyes, giving his
T-shirt a playful tug.
"Three cognacs and three coffees," Dread orders at
the bar.
Our Hero and Justine are at a table. Horse has been
nicked. They've rang the Legal Aid Committee but
there's fuck all anyone can do until tomorrow and he'll
probably be released by then unless they're going to
bring him before a judge to get an detention order,
which was unlikely.
"You mean he was just standing there, doing
nothing," Our Hero is saying.
"He was shouting. He was at the edge of a group of
people. They were all shouting, screaming at some
Bulle on the other side of the street - and suddenly a
pile of them came around the corner out of nowhere
and jumped on him."
She's feeling the cumulative effects of the alcohol
she's been consuming intermittently all afternoon on a
stomach empty save for a donar kebab.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Dread arrives with the goodies.
"If he has any sense he'll play the dumb Auslander,"
he says, raising his glass: "Me-no-speaky-Deutschski.
Me-lost-tourist. Na zdorovje!" 50
"Na zdorovje!"
He's drunk too, but not as visibly as Our Hero.
"I think," he says slowly, "that some action is in
order. The Commerzbank down by my place is a sitting
duck - and the last time I looked it's windows were
more or less intact - with all this going on there's no
way that there'll be any Bullen up that way."
They put him alone in a cell after they'd processed him,
checked his identity and barked at him in broken
English. Had he been throwing stones? Why had he
come to Germany? Did he have a job? His stomach
heaving all through it. But he'd played dumb, and they
seemed to have fallen for it, the stupid bastards. He'd
also tried the indignant Irish citizen approach, but that
had not quite worked. They eventually escorted him
down here, pushing him senselessly down the stark
corridor. His stomach heaves again. The alcohol, the
gas, the stress. He can't hold it down any longer. He
makes a rush for the toilet bowl in the floor.
Tina and Joschka sleep a post-orgasmic sleep in each
other's arms.
Normally it would have scared her out of her wits, but
the day, the alcohol, all that has happened, Horse's
arrest, those madmen in uniform tearing down
50 Auslander - foreigner, literally 'outlander' .
104
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
OranienstraBe belting out mindlessly at anyone and
everyone makes Justine past caring about possible
consequences as they fling the cobblestones at the
Commerzbank windows.
"Smash them all!" Our Hero screams. "Smash them
all!"
The sound of cracking glass and then the alarm siren
howling reverberates up and down the empty street.
When Dread smashes the last one they turn and run,
coming to a stop about a hundred metres on, when it
becomes obvious that no one's following. They are
breathless.
The Wall is on the other side of the canal,
illuminated along the whole of its length to near¬
daylight by flood lights.
"Know what?" Dread says.
He hates the bastards on the Other Side as much as
the ones on this side.
The other two look at him and see the conspiratorial
grin.
"1 think we should have a go at these fuckers here,"
he says, nodding in the direction of one of the
watchtowers. "At least lob a few stones over. After
all, we've had a go at western capitalism and fair's
fair."
One look at each other. They're game.
But lobbing stones over the Wall is always a bit of an
anticlimax. They just land, ignored like rubbish tossed
from a passing train or something - though no doubt
registered in some Stasi file as an incident at the Anti¬
imperialist Protective Wall - on the death-strip among
the rabbits and the rolls of barbed wire.
105
11
Kalypso, Tina and Heidi are in the courtyard, basking
in a gradually shrinking rectangle of sunshine. All
three are in shorts, barefoot and drinking fresh coffee.
"That could come down for a start," Heidi says,
indicating the high crumpling wall that separates the
courtyards. "We'd get some more sun."
The courtyard is cluttered. Bikes chained to the rusty
railings around the cellar steps. Rubbish bins.
Furniture left out to rot like the old armchair Heidi is
lounging in. Tina is sitting on an upturned wooden
crate the same as the one they're using as a table.
"A few plants wouldn't go amiss either," Tina adds.
"The window frames and house doors could do with
a slap of paint," says Kalypso. "And a sandpit for the
children."
"And maybe some half-decent tables and chairs,"
says Tina, "might encourage the pensioners to emerge
out of their apartments now and again. The Herr Marx
never has any visitors. He only comes down to go to
Aldi. And I've only seen the madwoman on the top
floor once."
In the silence that follows she gets up and disappears
into the house. A few minutes later she returns
carrying two half-used tins of paint, some old brushes
in a jam jar of white spirit and strips of sandpaper.
"No time like now,” she says.
"What colours do you have?" Kalypso asks.
106
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Yellow and orange.”
Tina starts to sandpaper the peeling poison-green
door to the back house.
"I rarely make quick decisions," says Justine.
She and Horse are sitting on the wall in
Chamissoplatz, waiting to have a go on the table-
tennis table.
But there were exceptions, like the way she decided
to come to Berlin.
"I know 1 should make up my mind but ...”
Horse nods. He's made clear often enough his
willingness to help her clean out the room. So have
the others.
She can't quite decide what it is that's holding her
back. The state of the place? Or the insecurity of the
whole Besetzer thing?
Their turn at the table-tennis table comes.
As they play her eyes are drawn again and again to a
group of Turkish women sitting on a bench behind
Horse. Wrapped in scarves and long dresses, they
seem old before their time. Some of them are
obviously younger than herself. It makes her angry to
think of them there, almost veiled, rigid, daring to
take up only so much space, smilingly apologetic,
while she moves freely, her arms and legs bare to the
sun and air.
Horse is creeping ahead, but she concentrates and is
soon in the lead again, not that it really matters who
wins but she does get a kick out of beating men - not
that Horse is the macho type.
On the other hand, she's been over it often enough in
her mind and every time she comes to the same
107
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
conclusion: move in, take the plunge!
She wins 21-17.
"Another round?" Horse suggests.
She tosses him the ball.
"Your serve."
She wins the first point easily.
"I'll start tomorrow," she shouts at him as he goes to
retrieve the ball. "I'll start cleaning out the room
tomorrow."
Tina climbs onto the bed and kisses Joschka again.
"I've put the coffee on," she says.
"Come back to bed!"
He's aroused and cosy and wants her.
She shakes her head.
"I'm going to go out and buy some breakfast. We can
eat it in here. The common room is in a mess - as
usual."
"Where are the IRA?"
"They didn't come back last night. Probably kipped at
their so-called office. Our Hero said something about
having to get the Magazine to the printers."
She begins to dress.
The windows are open. It looks like it was going to
be another scorcher.
"We could go to the lakes," she says.
"I'd like to, but I've got a few things to do.”
"Huh! Now who's being serious?"
His seriousness is fighting against the way the world
is organised. Hers is more personal.
"When I was at the uni I went around with a digital
watch in my head and planned my life out in a peacenik
diary," she says.
108
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
It's a statement of how much she thinks she's
changed.
Gestetnered flyer:
TUWAT will be like Tunix, only the
opposite. 51 The West Berlin CDU Senate
wants to evict nine squatted houses.
How are we going to react to this? How
are we going to stop it? Waldemarstrafle
has had the IDEA that something like
Tunix can be organised, only this time
it will be TUWAT. With 3,000 squatters
in Berlin it must be possible! But
where do we start?
We've started by producing this leaflet.
We are passing it on to our typesetting,
printing and alternative newspaper
friends. They will hopefully take over
the publicity and propaganda side of
things and get the word out - to Hamburg,
Frankfurt, Freiburg, Bremen, Munich,
Zurich, Basel, Amsterdam, Groningen,
London, Liverpool, Copenhagen,
Stockholm, Paris, Rome, Naples, Belfast,
Milan, Madrid, the Basque country. East
Berlin, Moscow, Prague and Warsaw.
We need to inform everyone we know in
West Germany and abroad! Send them
leaflets and posters! The alternative
press must be kept up to date with
developments. Leaflets and posters must
be printed - and distributed. Info
centres need to be set up, be open round
the clock and have telephones. All media
groups must be activated - video groups,
pirate radio stations.
51 'tuwat' is a slang expression meaning 'do
something', while 'tunix' means 'do nothing'. Tunix
was an action organised in 1978 in Berlin by the so-
called Spontis.
109
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Food: Kneipen, cafes must organise
regular meals for those who come. Field
kitchens will be needed.
Accommodation: every squatted house, and
that means EVERY squatted house, needs to
arrange sleeping places and inform the
TUWAT info centres so that they can co¬
ordinate the allocation of places.
We need to form action groups to plan
street parties, meetings, exhibitions,
films, music, theatre and other
happenings. These action groups will
need to work together. Representatives
of each one can meet to organise bigger
things: demos, events at the Technical
Uni, in the Hasenheide. Prison groups
can hold events on prisons. The same
goes for groups involved in other
things, such as police repression, NATO,
Ireland, Latin America, nuclear power,
housing, unemployment, urban guerrillas,
music and street theatre.
Netzwerk and other organisations must
be asked to give money. That will also
have to be organised.
We'll build defensive villages on all
the squares of Berlin and fill the city
with Chaoten, terrorists. Punks,
hippies, tramps, alcoholics, gays,
lesbians, Kraakern 5 ‘, rastas and crazies.
This city must bubble and boil and
stink. The autumn must be long and hot.
We need to mobilise at all levels - the
AL, unis, schools, local areas, VIPs.
A lot of people are on holiday but if
we really get stuck in, surely we can
get it on its feet within three weeks.
We have no choice. We either resist or
give up.
Kraakern - Dutch squatters.
110
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
The establishment already has the
shits. Chief Pig Lummer 53 is already
squealing for Federal Police and the
Civilian Police Reserve.
Can we hope for 50,000 people? Why not?
We can try!
Publicise this leaflet in our papers,
our radios and all our other media
outlets, but especially through word of
mouth, the most effective media outlet
of them all.
Stick it up in every toilet!
Publicise TUWAT with articles and
graffiti!
Organise !
Don't hide your ideas in your heads!
Live them!
Send this to your friends! Photocopy
it!
Above all COME! For ONE DAY or ONE
MONTH, but COME!
Turn the Autobahns into bicycle
lanes!
Turn BARLIN into the biggest
kindergarten ever!
The bricks and bottles of Brixton were
Charles and Di's wedding present!
Prove that we are wrong, that we
underestimate ourselves!
Come to TUWAT in Berlin and tear down all
the walls!
Let's blow ourselves up - out of our own
isolation!
Contact address: Mieterrat Waldemarstrafle
29, 1000 Berlin 36. Tel 65 12 52.
The long-haired moustached guy wraps up a bundle of
’Tuwat fur Tuwat' leaflets in a copy of the
Heinrich Lummer, Innensenator, in charge of the
Berlin police.
Ill
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Tagesspiegel, sticks his head out the door to check
that Willibald-Alexis-StraBe is free of Bullen and
leaves Cafe Krautscho.
"Shall we start?" Rudi says, raising his voice above
the din.
There are about ten people in the place, most of
them engaged in criss-cross conversations punctuated
by the sound of coins dropping into the plastic cup on
the pamphlet-strewn desk to pay for the coffee and the
bottles of SchultheiB.
"The basic idea of this first meeting," he says, "is to
discuss generally what we can do locally - and try and
work out a rota so we can have this place open every
day for the next seven weeks."
Somebody suggests they do the rota first.
Heike, from the same house as Rudi, sketches a rough
table on a sheet of A4 and passes it around to be filled
out.
"We also need to organise work groups," Rudi
continues.
Tina signs up for Wednesdays. Joschka has himself
put down for Thursdays.
"At the moment the most important thing is the
publicity," Rudi goes on.
"Propaganda,” Dmitri shouts from the corner.
"... but the people in WaldemarstraBe are handling
that end of things fairly well. All we have to do here is
distribute the stuff. But they do need the 'Tuwat fur
Tuwat' leaflet translated. They've had some translations
done but it appears that most of them are pretty
crappy."
Our Hero volunteers to do one into English. A woman
with a ring in her nose says she knows a Dutch woman
112
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
who might help, her Austrian accent melodic in
comparison to mixture of Szene-Deutsch and
Berlinerisch nearly everyone else is speaking. Her
name is Ursula.
"What about T-shirts?" Dmitri says.
He's sober today, articulate. But he's helping himself
to more of the crate of SchultheiB than anyone else.
"Those white T-shirts cost almost nothing and there's
a place in Mehringhof that will print slogans on them
dirt cheap. We could have Tuwat printed on them.
They can't arrest people just for wearing a T-shirt. Can
they? And if they did, it'd be great propaganda.”
The suggestion might be taken more seriously if it
was from someone else.
"They'd look stupid," Joschka says. "We’d look like
something from fucking Disneyland. That's the kind of
mass uniformity we want to get away from, isn't it?
We'd be like people who go around with Coca Cola and
Marlboro ads plastered all over them."
Dmitri raises his eyes to heaven, shakes his head and
says he's going to go ahead with the idea anyway - on
his own. Not that anyone believes he will.
"1 don't think we're going to have many problems
with publicity." It's the familiar boom of Big Bruno's
voice. He's just come in. "Not with the way the BZ
and Napoleon Bonaparte Lummer, not to mention the
TV, are foaming at the mouth. Banning the leaflets is
the best publicity they could have given us. It'd be
better still if they banned the whole thingamajig.
That'd get 'em coming here in droves. The more the
pigs overreact and fall for our propaganda, the better."
"Does anyone know exactly what actions our
benevolent masters have actually taken?" Ursula asks.
113
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"I was in the WaldemarstraBe this morning," Joschka
informs her. "The Bullen had already been. They'd
confiscated some leaflets, maybe a few hundred. But
the things are being printed on every available
alternative printing press in the city."
"They've searched cars that look as though they
belong to Freaks going to Wessiland at Dreilinden.
and confiscated any they found," Rudi adds, "but
they're being printed in Wessiland as well." 54
"1 think it's really important that we use our personal
contacts," Ursula says. "If we all wrote ten letters and
asked the people we wrote to contact their friends,
word would really get out. There are at least 3,000
Besetzer in Berlin."
There's murmured agreement.
"It's got to work on an individual basis as well,"
Heike adds. "Or it won't work at all."
Rudi feels they're beginning to go off in tangents.
"The publicity is being managed. The most
important thing for us here, it seems to me, is what
exactly are we going to do here in this Kiez."
"We could organise a street party for the first day?"
Muck says. The idea has just come to him.
"Without applying for permission," someone adds
amidst the general murmurs of approval.
"The Chamissoplatz street party is on that day
anyway,” Big Bruno says.
Rudi makes a note in block letters on his pad.
West Berlin is completely surrounded by the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik (DDR), East Germany, the Other
Side. There are several official entry points to the
city for those travelling by road from West Germany
and through the DDR: Dreilinden and Staaken
(mentioned later) are two of them.
114
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Any other ideas? The sooner we can say that we're
doing something, the easier it'll be to get the details
onto the general Tuwat programme that the
WaldemarstraBe people are going to get printed."
"Would this time next week be okay?" Big Bruno
asks.
"I suppose so.”
"Then we all have a week to think about it," Big
Bruno says. "And if people just drop the details into
here during the week, we can have a proper list by
then."
"Whoever's here," a guy at the door adds, "should
make a list of available sleeping places. And maybe
we should put notices up around the place - in the
Chamisso Galerie and the Tenants' Centre - asking
people who have places to come here and put their
names down."
Dmitri helps himself to another beer, casually
pretending to forget to drop a mark in the plastic cup.
Rudi gives him a half-hearted dirty look.
"Manana," Dmitri mumbles and proceeds to immerse
himself into listening to the discussion which is
rapidly degenerating, or evolving - depending on your
point of view - into a free-for-all. 55
Muck starts to roll a joint.
Manana - Spanish for 'tomorrow'.
115
12
"Christ, what are you doing?" Horse asks. "This place
stinks.
"Trying to disguise this thing," Our Hero says,
referring to a leather jacket he has draped over the
back of a chair.
He gives the spray can another shake.
Horse had nicked the jacket in a Ku'damm disco a
few nights previously. The next morning, feeling bad
about giving in to his kleptomaniac tendencies yet
again, he'd made a present of it to Our Hero. They'd
burned the identity card they'd found in it.
"Is it unrecognisable now?"
Horse shakes his head, though paranoia is one thing
he does understand.
"How did the Tuwat meeting go?"
"Quite good. I said I'd translate the Tuwat leaflet
into English. Give me a hand if you like."
"Sure. As long as we obey the first principle of
propaganda writing ...”
"And what's that?"
"There's only one thing worse than believing the
enemy's propaganda ..."
"And that is?"
"Believing your own propaganda."
"This stuff dries fairly quickly, doesn't it?" Our Hero
says, referring to the spray paint he's put on the
leather jacket.
116
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Think so."
Horse sits down on the bed.
"The meeting was good," Our Hero says. "People
were really enthusiastic."
"The spirit was among them."
"Something like that. They're already talking about
calling up the police reserve - the last time they did
that was in '68 - and even bringing in Bullen from
West Germany - which strictly speaking, is illegal
under the Four Power Agreement." 56
Our Hero puts a finishing hiss of silver on the
sleeves of the jacket.
"According to which anarcho-lawyer?"
In Ireland politics is about people killing each other,
or starving themselves to death right now as they
speak.
"I'd like to put a slogan on the back of this," Our
Hero says.
"What about BIG BROTHER IS BEING WATCHED?"
Typewritten notes taken by Our Hero for an article in
the Magazine:
winterfeldtstr 211, 213: 2 houses joined
together, lots of space, squatters seem
more intellectual/studenty than the
average, jiirgen showed us around, they've
done a lot of work, planning to have a
'father of the constitution' - one of the
people who drew it up and is sympathetic
to the cause - stay with them as a
sponsor, would allow either me or horse
■ The Four Power Agreement - agreement between the
USA, the USSR, Great Britain and France on the post¬
war legal status of Berlin.
117
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
to stay in the house to report on the
eviction, a good balcony to take photos
from if we decide to. not at all a
'heavy' crowd, can expect passive
resistance.
luckauer-str 3: in kreuzberg. down a back
street right up against the wall, lots of
flags and banners draped out the windows.
Front house-door shut, disgusting smell,
notice on door said the stink, caused by
buttersaure 5 ', was put there by lummer,
springer and co. a young woman opened the
door, said she was alone except for
another woman who was sick, but if we
came around tomorrow at seven we could
have a look around, they are having a
public meeting tomorrow too at 8 - maybe
we'd be interested in attending it? a
general air of paranoia and state of
siege about the place, horse nicknamed
the place 'apocalypse now',
dieffenbachstr 8: impressive in many
ways, the people were outside at a table
with a petition against the evictions.
asked us to sign, told them who we were
and what we wanted, two very young punky
girls showed us around, one of them had a
pet rat. very friendly and glad to see
us. they've done a lot of work and are
doing more, despite the threat of
eviction, showed us the courtyard, they
were painting it and intend turning it
into an open-air cafe, on Saturday they
plan to have breakfast outside on the
pavement and later readings in the house
by 'famous' poets and writers, one of
them they insisted was 'very famous' - a
maximilian somebody or other, both of
them were berliners. they had also done
Butyric acid, a component of vomit, a stink bomb.
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up the rest of the house, however, it
had been in fairly good condition when
they moved in. some of the apartments
are still occupied by tenants - a
turkish and a yugoslav family, said they
had a good relationship with them both,
promised to send them some copies of the
zine .
More from Our Hero's typewritten notes:
public meeting in luckauer-str 3:
arrived too late to be shown around
house, on original hit list but they
have just received an invitation to
talks from the owners, they are
suspicious, don't trust them, also don't
want to betray or compromise the
movement by unilateral action,
one woman - annette - did most of the
talking, got the impression that most
of them did not have much confidence
in the effectiveness of meetings,
given lots of details about plans for
the house, planning permission
applications etc. the usual story,
audience sometimes looked as if they
were there to fill out an evening,
most of them were the type of young
middle-class german intellectual,
politically orientated and aware, but
who would never squat a house
themselves for fear of the
consequences it would have on their
careers, berufsverbot? (but isn't that
is only for hardcore card-carrying
commies ?) 58
Berufsverbot - Communist or communists (with a small
c) can be excluded from certain jobs in the public
sector, e.g. to work as teachers.
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history: this is the third group to
occupy the place, the other two groups
left because of police harassment, the
first meets of the squatters council
took place here, in fact, it was founded
here, the famous mass arrest under the
paragraph 219 anti-terrorist thing also
took place here, there's been several
searches since - and a lot of 'coverage'
from the springer rags,
asked why they didn't pay for the
electricity, horse's idea - provocative
bastard! said they're being criminalised
anyway with the searches and various
arrests, paying it would make no
difference to that.
would they accept a five-year licence to
stay? no. why should they? they want a
general solution to the problem, and why
should they pay rent to firms who
exploit their tenants, especially the
pensioners and the auslander. wanted to
stress that they were interested in
alternative ways of living and in trying
to make the area liveable in - an area
which for all its shit they find to be a
more human environment than the new
housing estates, there's life on
kreuzberg's streets, bit of a public
relations job. contact: annette.
idea for another article: paddies in
berlin. came to me as we were going
into the besetzer-eck for a beer and
saw 'ira/inla' written on the road in
metre-high letters, besides visiting
paddy pubs and asking people what they
think of the hunger strikes and h-
blocks and all that, could also visit
the bobby sands pub in the besetzt
house on bulowstr. actually, that is on
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the hit list too, so we should visit
it. paddy angle might be good for
ads . 59
Horse and Kalypso squirt tubes of blue, yellow and red
paint onto the virgin-white walls of Horse's room.
When they've finished the thick multicoloured paint
freckles the walls with blobs of various shapes and
sizes, most of them with tails like comets.
Horse looks at it and makes a face.
"Not exactly what I expected."
Justine has also started painting her room.
Mondbogen gets up from the floor, bows slowly to the
sunlight streaming through the window and begins to
dress. She's at ease now, in tune with her body and the
earth, the way she usually feels after her morning yoga
session.
She sits down again, cross-legged, and eats her bowl
of grated apple, muesli and fruit juice. Her private
peace mission had begun in Washington. Checkpoint
Charlie is the nearest she has managed to get to
Moscow, that other pivot of the axis of pathetic old
men who ruled through fear.
There's a demonstration today, one to do with this
thing Tuwat. She plans to get some flowers and
distribute them to the demonstrators, and to the police.
59 The H Blocks refers to Long Kesh Prison / the Maze
Prison in Northern Ireland where IRA and Loyalist
prisoners are imprisoned. IRA prisoners are on hunger
strike demanding to be recognised as political
prisoners / prisoners of war. Bobby Sands is the
first hunger striker to die, on the 5 May 1981. He
had been elected to the UK Parliament earlier in the
year.
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She thinks of the words of that poem again:
Long after
The mythical Aquarian Age of peace
Has dawned on a dead world;
Is it really going to be like that, she wonders. A
cataclysm and then a starting all over again?
At the dawn
A naked woman
Her breasts firm with milk
And a naked child
Will walk along a seashore.
Yet, for all its dreadfulness, it's a reassuring vision, one
of the cosmos and the earth renewing itself no matter what
humanity does. She has no doubt that everything is
moving towards the time of crisis, of weijl, the time of
danger and opportunity. She wonders what the author
is like for a moment, but then puts her mind to where
she is going to get some cheap, or better still, free
flowers.
Justine starts putting the last of the rubbish into a black
bin bag. The back kitchen, which she'd eventually
decided to turn into a darkroom, is slowly getting there.
She'd chiselled the damp crumbling plaster away and
taken up the rotten floorboards but the musty fungus
smell still lingers. Tomorrow she'll start plastering the
walls.
She's covered in dust and sweat, but she feels clean,
alive and purified, like after good sex, your body
smeared with sweat and dried sperm and ...
She finishes up and decides to make coffee. She's glad
she's decided to move in. It's brought her out of herself
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in some way. Maybe it's the amount of people who're
always around the place. Or just the fact that she's
moving into somewhere kind of permanent. Big Bruno
and Our Hero assure her that the place will be one of
the last to be evicted. Though this summer the future
seems to be an extremely nebulous entity. Maybe it's
just as well to have a healthy disregard for the future -
or the No Future - to plough on regardless, despite the
horrors and the shit, the Bomb, rapes and war, the
Third World - and what the politicians, who have the
nerve to call the Punks 'nihilists', are turning the world
into.
She switches on the boiler and looks for the coffee
things.
Except for Our Hero behind his closed bedroom door
making a sporadic racket at his typewriter, the place is
empty. And the common room is in a fucking mess.
Glancing through the window to the sun-lit courtyard
she sees that the two Turkish girls have come in to play
again. They're drawing hopscotch squares on the
concrete ground with lumps of masonry. They're a pest
usually, climbing in through the windows the second
your back is turned, nicking things and as cheeky as
hell. In fact, it's uncannily still, only the sound of Our
Hero's typewriter and, somewhere in the distance, the
receding chop-chop-chop of one of the helicopters that
regularly patrol the perimeter of USAF Tempelhof.
She knocks at Our Hero's door.
"How's your paranoia today?" she jokes.
He makes a face.
The day or rather the night before yesterday he and
Dread - in another fit of drunken rebelliousness - had
decorated the walls of the local Aldi. On the way back
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from the demo they'd seen one of the special anti-
graffiti Bullen units painting over some previous work.
They'd come back to the apartment, finished a bottle of
Intershop something or other, come up with the
brilliant idea of undoing the damage - as it were - and
gotten a few pots of paint together. They'd written
Tuwat, IRA/INLA and drawn a few crude shamrocks
on the wall, and then for good measure written 1-2-3-
let-the-prisoners-free, the Besetzer rallying cry,
across the street. Dread had relished describing the
whole escapade over early afternoon breakfast the
following day. He'd told Our Hero that he'd actually
signed his name to it. Our Hero had actually gone
down to make sure he hadn't.
"When is the next issue of the Magazine coming
out?" she asks.
"We're no longer involved in it."
"Why not?"
"The usual collective rows. Personality clashes.
Political clashes. The whole thing was too much on
the democratic centralist side for our liking. Hippy
tendency." 60
There's a photo of a riot cop in the taz, visor up, his eyes
blacked out so as not to be identifiable, a rose stuck in
his belt. The caption reads: The rose distributor
recommended he 'take it easy'.
Democratic centralism - principle of internal
organisation of Eastern European Communist parties;
decisions made by higher bodies are absolutely
binding on lower bodies and party members, and no
internal opposition is allowed.
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Big Bruno nods in the direction of the Passionskirche
stall: "Even Jesus is supporting us."
"Oh, give them a break,” Kalypso says, "they're
sponsoring some of the houses."
They make their way across Chamissoplatz. The
square is packed. Music is blaring from the stage.
The air is thick with the sweet smoke of barbequing.
The smell of roasting meat hangs in the summer air.
There's stalls galore: wine, the SPD, kebabs, beer,
books, solidarity committees, games and puppets. A
pile of kids and toddlers are queuing up to get their
faces painted. And lots of familiar local faces: Dmitri
with his eternal bottle of SchultheiB in a crazy Tuwat
T-shirt, Heidi with some people from the Chamisso
Galerie. Our Hero chatting away in English to some
Chinese-looking woman in shorts. It's like this every
year and like any other street party really, except this
one is theirs.
Tina is in Cafe Krautscho with Ursula while the street
party is going on. It's been quiet all afternoon, only two
or three people have dropped in. A transit pulls up
outside.
For a second they think it's only going to park there,
to keep a eye on the festivities, but the Bullen start
getting out and the Oberbulle walks in the door,
followed by the others.
"Search," he announces.
The place is squatted so they don't need a warrant.
"Identity cards, bitte," says another.
Another one starts rummaging through the piles of
leaflets on the desk while another goes through the
drawers.
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Ursula doesn't have her identity card with her.
"Why not?" he asked in that offhand friendly Bulle
manner. He's young, sports a blond moustache, and is
tanned - obviously just back from his summer holidays.
"I never have it on me. As a matter of principle!"
The Oberbulle is examining Tina's.
"Nice photograph. But a bit of a transformation since
it was taken. Not Papa's and Mama's little girl
anymore, eh? Not from the way you look now
anyway."
"Drugs and bad company probably," remarks the
tanned one, in a mock serious tone, smiling at her.
"Very funny.”
One of the others begins to take away bundles of the
leaflets.
"Read them as you're at it," Ursula shouts after him.
"If you can."
Then she says to Tina, loud so the Bullen will
overhear: "I sure am glad we don't live on the Other
Side. They actually censor things there!"
"There's no comparison," says the Oberbulle, "and
you know that as well as I do. They'll be handed over
to the Public Prosecutor and if they are not found to
be inciting people to break the law, you'll get them
back. I'm sorry, but we'll have to take you along with
us too, just to check out your identities. You'll be free
in an hour if you co-operate.
"We have to make sure that you are not wanted
terrorists, you know,” the tanned one wisecracks,
obviously enjoying it all, as they are led out the door.
126
13
The sequence of events that follow are not
unforeseeable. It's announced over the PA that the
Tuwat office has been raided and two women have
been arrested. A small crowd makes its way up
FreisenstraBe to the police station to demand their
release. They are dispersed by a baton charge - a
pretty half-hearted one - and before anyone knows
what's happening a building site is being dismantled
and a barricade erected across Willibald-Alexis-
StraBe, cutting the Bullen off from Chamissoplatz -
symbolically at least. By then Tina and Ursula have
been released, they have been let out the back door of
the police station.
"Come on, give us a hand," Joschka is shouting at no
one in particular, trying to pull the wooden fence
around the building site down. Two guys, both
wearing masks, begin to help him.
Our Hero and Horse exchange looks.
"It looks like the peasants are revolting,” Horse
smirks.
Without further ado, and with an air almost of
inevitability, Horse starts carting bricks over to put on
the barricade. Our Hero joins him. About twenty
people are doing the same.
Big Bruno is standing with Heidi in the doorway of
Wilibald-Alexis-StraBe 11. She has a key and is ready
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to let people into the courtyard and lock the house
doors if the Bullen suddenly advance from their
positions down the street to try and take the barricade.
"Here we go again," Big Bruno half-laughs, shaking
his head.
The music from Chamissoplatz has stopped. The stalls
are being quickly dismantled. A lot of the people have
already gone, but the crowd milling around the
barricade is growing. The light is fading.
Heidi overhears some people who obviously don't
know each other arguing.
"This is just shitting on your own doorstep. Why
don't they go and do it on the Ku'damn, and hit the
capitalist state where it really feels it - in its pocket!"
"You just can't let them get away with this sort of
provocation. They've just smashed their way into that
Besetzer cafe and arrested two people who weren't
doing anything - and right in the middle of a street
party. That's deliberate provocation."
"The Bullen think they own the place. Whose street
is it anyway?"
"Building a barricade is only asking for it. There are
still people with kids down on Chamissoplatz!"
"The barricade is there to protect the people on
Chamissoplatz."
"Bullshit!"
He's right of course, Heidi thinks. The young Punk
girl's idea of it being a protection rather than an
unconsidered act of anger is naive to say the least.
One of the guys in masks starts setting the barricade
alight.
It burns slowly. People gather around the flames as
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
they would around a bonfire. They sit in its glare on
the edges of the pavement and on windowsills,
talking, drinking, smoking. Cobblestones are being
dug up.
Darkness comes and the gas lights go on, but people
climb up the lamp posts and put them out. Except for
the light from the burning barricade the street is
immersed in darkness. The two Kneipen on
Chamissoplatz, Schlemihl and the Krug, are doing a
roaring trade. It's a kind of stalemate. Momentary
panic breaks out now and again when someone thinks
they see some movement down by the police lines.
The fire brigade tries to get through - but it withdraws
after someone throws a cobblestone in its general
direction.
The fire goes out, and all that's left is glowing embers
and blackened bricks strewn across the cobbled street.
People gradually begin to realise that the next time
the Bullen make a move it'll be for real.
"They'll be coming any minute now,” Joschka is
shouting.
It's impossible to make out how many Bullen there
are. Hopefully the Bullen can't tell how many they are
either - though by now they've had ample time to slip
a few Zivis into the crowd. The guy who set the
barricade alight - Joschka recognises him from the
graffiti on his leather jacket - is throwing the
remnants of some planks onto it. But there's fuck all
left to burn at this stage. The familiar clickitty-
clackitty-click of seasoned and would-be street
fighters banging cobblestones together is starting up.
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Our Hero can just make out the silhouettes of Tina
and Heidi in the doorway of Willibald-Alexis-StraBe
11. There's no sign of Horse.
"Stone throwers up front," a woman shouts, her
voice muffled by the yellow scarf covering her face.
Our Hero follows her cue but whether he'll actually
have the nerve to do it is another question. He's never
thrown stones at human beings before - well not since
he was about twelve. The argument that they are
wearing full protective armour and he's only in T-
shirt, shorts and gym shoes doesn't quite square,
ethically. And Christ, he's not even masked.
But he finds some reassurance in seeing familiar
faces: Joschka, Schreiner and Big Bruno, and a woman
he'd seen at the Tuwat meeting.
"Scary, isn’t it?"
It's Horse.
It is. As the man said, bravery is basically a lack of
imagination.
All they can make out in the darkness at the end of
the street is the odd reflected glimmer on a shield or
helmet.
"Seems a bit naff to me," Horse is saying, "standing
around exposed like this. They could easily come up
on us from behind. The square is deserted except for
the crowd outside the Krug.
"If they did, we wouldn't have any way out and they
always leave an exit. Their main aim is to disperse
crowds, not hem them in."
The statement sounded lame.
Suddenly the Bullen start to advance, or seem to, and
a half-hearted volley of cobblestones is unleashed.
"Don't panic! Don't panic!" the woman with the
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yellow scarf shouts.
Other voices take up the familiar cry.
Nobody seems to know whether it's a false alarm or
the real thing. People who had turned to run stop and
come back.
But then there's a crack and a flash and then a teargas
canister, hissing and belching a tail of white smoke, is
bearing in on them.
Time slows down.
It's now or never. Our Hero flings his first stone. In
his heart, realising the sheer force he has thrown it with
and the momentum it would gather, hopes that it will
only hit a shield - if anything. Then he runs for it, past
people who are blindly flinging more stones. The cloud
of white gas is filling the street. He sprints with the
crowd into the empty darkness of Chamissoplatz. He
means to throw the second stone, but there's too many
people between him and the Bullen who are now
emerging charging from the gas cloud. He lets it drop
and runs down the cobbled street, passing the crowd
outside the Krug who are making a desperate rush to
get inside, and makes his way into the perceived safety
of one of the side streets.
"That's the CDU for you," the guy from the Chamisso
Galerie is saying to his mate at the bar in the Krug
about an hour later. "Expect more of it."
"Bullshit!" A young woman standing beside them
butts in. "The Bullen were exactly the same under the
SPD. There's fuck all difference between them."
"The Tweedledum and Tweedledee theory of
politics," he says. "Give me a break."
Schreiner, huddling over a potent Urbock beer, sees
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Justine come in.
"What's been happening?" she asks. She's been at the
lakes and has just come back.
He tells her, more or less, finishes his Urbock and
goes to the bar for another bottle.
Joschka and Tina appear.
"A pre-Tuwat action on the part of the Bullen,"
Joschka says. "Something to remind us who's in
charge."
"Part of the great conspiracy, I suppose, Tina says.
"You saw that Verfassungsschutz letter," he says.
Copies of it had been distributed during the week. 61
"Any idiot with a typewriter could have done that,"
she says.
His innocence and naivety went hand in hand.
"It could also be genuine," he counters rather half¬
heartedly. "And there was that article in Zitty - speculative
of course - which suggested that the Bullen might use the
Chamissoplatz street party as a pretext to get tough before
Tuwat." 62
Horse is in the kitchen pouring a two-litre bottle of
the real cheap Aldi red - a mixture from six East
European countries - into himself when Our Hero
comes back. He looks in a state.
"Christ, 1 need a drink!"
Our Hero helps himself to a glass.
"Just been down in the Krug. The place was fucking
packed with pub revolutionaries stuffing themselves
sick with drink. The gallery crowd and the Tenants
Verfassungsschutz - the intelligence service,
literally 'Protectors of the Constitution' .
Zitty - one of Berlin's events magazines.
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Centre crowd waffling on about tactics. One guy was
even going on about how it was in '68. Enough to
make you puke!”
He finishes the glass in one go and fills it up again.
"Schreiner was well out of it. He told this SPD guy
that the SPD were as bad as the Nazis and the SPD
guy was screaming at him that anyone who said that
was either evil or stupid or both. Then Schreiner says,
cool as a breeze, after they'd been roaring at each
other for about ten minutes: 'Or they might just be
taking the piss!' - and started laughing his head off.
You look positively in pain - as Schopenhauer might
say?"
"Just a wallop from a Bulle's baseball bat across the
back of my shoulder, that's all. It hurts, but it's more
the shock than anything. The cunt just missed my
head by inches."
Later, after Our Hero has gone upstairs to Heidi,
borrowed some herbal ointment and is applying it to
the reddening baton-shaped bruise across Horse's
back, Justine arrives in with the news that Schreiner
has just been arrested.
"We were down in the Krug," she says, "and
suddenly these Bullen barge in and one of them tells
Adorno that if he doesn't close the place and have it
empty within two minutes they'd do it for him. They
said someone had set a builder's wagon on fire and
had been seen running in there. Adorno said that was
rubbish, that it was him who'd actually called the fire
brigade. The Bullen left but said they'd be back.
People were calling them arseholes and pigs as they
went out the door. But they kept their word. A minute
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ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
later they shot a teargas canister through the door and
were wading in with their batons, screaming at us to
get out, and calling us dirty communist lefty
bastards."
"It's fairly well known as an SPD Kneipe," Our Hero
informs them. "A lefty one."
"They arrested a few people but just told the rest of
us to disappear. They dragged one woman out by the
hair. Schreiner was with us on the other side of the
street shouting at them. He still had a bottle of that
really strong beer in his hand. Trust him to have held
onto it. He was really getting worked up and out of it
and finally chucked the bottle at one of the transits,
but before it even hit the thing two Zivis - they'd been
standing beside us all the time - had him on the ground
and were calling out to the uniformed ones for help.
There was nothing we could do, except run."
"ScheiBe," Our Hero says. "I hope the fuck he's still
not on probation."
Tina and Joschka are facing each other, lying on their
sides. His larger hips are between her legs and he's
moving his cock gently in and out of her, his hands on
her breasts. She's closed her eyes and is blacking out
everything except his warm sturdy hard-on bringing
her gently to orgasm. She begins to move with him,
finding his hands, pressing them harder to her breasts
hungry for their touch, finding a shared rhythm,
forgetting him, herself, everything.
"I'm going to come soon," he whispers.
"Me too, just wait a little."
She moves harder, faster, pushing her clitoris down
against his cock.
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Melting into each other's juices and sweat, she
comes first, he shortly afterwards, and they sprawl on
the mattress, the sun flowing through the windows
onto their exhausted rejuvenated bodies.
They are gentler with each other then, kissing each
other tenderly, caressing each other with a new-found
playfulness.
This is the best time, she thinks.
"It's really good not to have to worry about getting
pregnant," she says after a while. "It's just so much
easier to let go."
"I'm glad."
She’d had a coil fitted a few days earlier.
Eventually they get up. It's still morning. They
have the whole warm day in front of them.
"These are all only first names," Porsche says, looking
through the sheets of notes he has taken. "We need
family names for proper identification. If you can't
provide them, you'll have to go through our mug
shots. I'm sure we have most of them on file - at HQ."
To be seen anywhere near a police building is the
last thing his informant wants. Meeting Porsche here in
this KantstraBe apartment, obviously rented out
especially for these kinds of liaisons is risky enough.
"It's difficult to get family names. We don't use them.
The only way I can do it is from letters or being nosey.
Someone might get suspicious."
Porsche notes the 'we'.
Even after years of processing informants in the
Political Department, he finds their weird loyalties, if
they could be called loyalties, still intrigue him.
"There are ways in which you can make yourself -
shall we say - unsuspicious.”
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"I know."
"We had a little chat about it the time before last. Or
has the cat got your memory?"
"You also said that there are limits to how far one can
go-”
"But they are flexible. Depending on the situation, of
course." And then, in quite a different tone, as if it
were off the record: "And how far did you go last
Saturday anyway?"
"I set the barricade on fire."
The blatancy of the admission is three-pronged: I hate
you bastards and I have the guts to do something about
it! And I dare you to do something about that! It
catches Porsche slightly off guard and that annoys him.
"By yourself?"
"Yes, but someone would have done it anyway.”
"Nobody ever gave you permission to initiate criminal
acts. My instructions have been quite clear. You may
participate passively, but not initiate or take an active
part. You know damn well that's just not on!"
He believes he really believes that. He has no
authority to process agents provocateurs and he
probably would have qualms about it if he was asked
to, though he probably would. But then, the borderline
was hazy sometimes.
"We could do you for that," he adds.
"But you won't! And besides the only proof you
have is this conversation ..."
"Don't be cheeky!" Porsche cuts him short. But the
bastard is right of course. After a while the blackmail
becomes mutual.
"Who built the barricade?"
"About twenty people. Most of them were masked."
"Did you recognise any of them?"
"They were masked.
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"And the ones who weren't - did you recognise any
of them?"
"Two of them were foreigners."
"Foreigners?"
"Yes, they spoke with accents."
"God, you are a fount of information. What kinds of
accents were they? Turkish, Italian, Chinese,
Russian? And when they weren't speaking German,
what did they speak?"
"English."
"That's better. And now could you please describe
these people to me?"
Trouble is, Porsche muses, as he notes down the
descriptions, you never know when these little bits
and pieces were going to be useful. But some day
some of it would be. In fact, he has no doubt at all
that some of these people are potential terrorists.
"And what about the others - the Germans who
didn't wear masks?
His informant is silent.
"You know some of them, don't you'?"
"One."
That's probably a lie, Porsche thinks. Those divided
loyalties again.
"Name?"
"Joschka."
"The same Joschka we spoke about. Earlier."
"Yes."
It isn't evidence of course, but it would go into the
computer. Its time of usefulness would come.
"Are you sure you don't know the names of any of
the others?"
"Yes.”
Porsche decides to call it a day.
"Okay, I hope all this is correct. For your sake! If
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you're holding back on us or making up fairy tales,
you're the one who's going to suffer for it in the end.
And, as 1 said before, no more initiating actions, only
passive participation, and that no more
enthusiastically than absolutely necessary. That's a bit
of friendly advice, 1 hope you heed it. I know you are
basically the same as them and that if we didn't have
this little thing on you, you'd be out there with them.
But I'm sure you'll remember which side your bread is
buttered on."
From his informant's surly silence Porsche knows
he's hit the right nerve.
It's time for the payoff.
Porsche extracts a roll of high-denomination D-
Marks.
"Sign here,” he says, passing his informant a receipt
slip and a biro.
His informant counts the notes.
"I suppose a copy of this receipt is out of the
question?" he says, signing.
"You suppose correctly."
138
14
"You're different," Our Hero tells Mondbogen softly.
He's lying on his back on the carpet. She's sitting
cross-legged beside him. Neither are wearing any
clothes.
"Everyone is different."
She smiles - her polite inscrutable Chinese one, not
her transparent American one, he thinks.
"You waste your sexual energy," she says. "Coming
is not the most important thing."
He's more than a mite taken aback by the statement.
"It's life energy, sperm is life energy," she says.
"You should use the energy to reach a higher
consciousness, not dissipate it."
"And that's bona fide ancient Chinese wisdom, 1
suppose."
"It is," she laughs. "But you believe what you want
to believe."
He reaches out and touches her arm, kisses her
breast lightly and lays back again.
"And Bhagwan wisdom too?" 63
"Don't be facetious!"
"I wasn't being."
"1 don't know," she says, being serious. "I'm not
63 Reference is to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian
guru whose followers wear distinctive orange clothing
and a picture of the guru on a necklace around their
necks. They are part of the street scene in West
Berlin.
139
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Bhagwan and I don't want to be. I like being with
them because of the good vibrations I feel when I'm
with them. That's all."
He shakes his head.
"Some of the things they are into are okay," he
admits. "Like vegetarianism and meditation and
therapy maybe. But, for fuck's sake, they way they run
around all dressed the same, all of them with exactly
the same picture of their ayatollah around their necks
... that's totally fascistic."
"And what about you and your friends. You wear a
uniform."
He gives her a genuinely puzzled look.
"Your leather jacket is a uniform. And now you are
even talking about dyeing your clothes black."
"That's a ...," he thinks quickly, "... it's an anti¬
uniform. And besides, we don't have leaders."
"Anti-uniform or not, it still alienates people."
"Yeah, the Bullen and the powers that be. It's meant
to."
"And nearly everyone else!"
Welcoming parties meet the first guests who cross the
border at Dreilinden and Staaken. There aren't as many
as have been hoped for, but it's early days yet. In
Wedding there's a torch-lit demo. In Kreuzberg the
KuKuCK holds a free concert. It's a basic principle of
Tuwat that all events be free.
The music pounds between the walls in the long
KuKuCK cafe. It's packed: pacifists and militants,
punks and hippies, 68ers and 81ers. Dancing vibrant
bodies hopping with a vengeance. That party smell of
140
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
sweat, tobacco, hash and alcohol in the clammy
evening air.
Justine, at the bar, a plastic cup of white wine in her
hand, is beginning to feel the effects of the Lebanese.
It's coming in pulses, in time with the music - the
drummer is good, and the beat of those bongos - with
the movements of the dancers. Silently, she finds
herself chanting 'tu-wat do-wat tu-wat' to herself as if it
were a mantra. Everything seems to be whirling into a
single vortex: the dancing bodies, minds, people,
spinning with the planet through the dark starry
vacuum of space on its endless journey to God-knows-
where, not that He/She/It exists ...
Crazy! Fou! It's strong stuff.
She lights a cigarette - the nicotine will steady her -
and watches Mondbogen dancing, her waist-long black
hair whirling around her small gyrating body.
Our Hero is looking at Mondbogen too, happy at her,
happy at everything right then, feeling in a way that
he's perhaps having the time of his life. The right
mixture of home-grown and SchultheiB, he tells
himself, and laughs inwardly at the typical
inappropriateness of his unreal cynicism.
He sees Justine.
"Fantastic atmosphere," he shouts into her ear as he
orders another beer.
She nods and shouts back: "Is Tina here?"
"She said she'd be along later. You missed dinner
tonight. Mondbogen cooked. Chinese." He takes a slug
from his SchultheiB. "You know, it's really good that
you moved in. It really is. We all like you.”
"Really,” she mutters, more than slightly
embarrassed, secretly pleased, wondering what on earth
141
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
she is supposed to say to that. Typical of him to go all
mellow and sentimental when he's drunk.
She glimpses Schreiner beyond Mondbogen's
swirling hair. He's pissed too by the look of him.
Tentatively, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a
cigarette in the other, he's beginning to join in the
dancing.
Schreiner's aware he's drunk and he's enjoying it. He
loves being totally out of it. He recognises one of the
dancers - the Chinese-American girl, the one Our Hero
seems to have something going with. He catches her
eye and she his. Smiles, simple demandless smiles
flash between them. He says something to her but by
the time she replies in her funny American accent, he's
forgotten what he originally said. Jesus Christ, as the
Irish were always saying, is he pissed!
"Have you been in this place before?" Our Hero asks
Justine.
"A few times," she nods.
"1 mean upstairs in the other parts?"
She nods again.
"What's it like?"
"They do a lot of theatre and dance. And they show
films sometimes. Obscure and experimental stuff. Not
obviously political like in the Frontkino. It's used for
meetings of the Betsetzer Council. The rooms upstairs
are massive. Used to be a factory. They made army
uniforms here during the war. The SS headquarters
used to be across the road, and you know that weird
hotel next door, Himmler apparently used to drink his
carrot juice there. He was quite into alternative
medicine, homeopathy and all that, herbs ... a pretty
weird area this, I wouldn't like to walk around it on
142
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
acid."
The drums and the bongos start up again ... the
present, becomes graspable, no longer a mere prelude
to what comes next.
Phew!
She finishes her wine, says she's going to dance and
disappears into the throng.
Our Hero finishes his beer and follows her.
Another of the endless pots of filter coffee is put down
on the yellow table in the common room, the
soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange churning over in
the cassette player for the umpteenth time.
"I'd heard something about Tuwat," Merton is saying.
"Word gets around. But we knew that a lot of squatting
was going on in Berlin anyway."
He's just arrived and it's about the third time he's had
to explain himself that day. The Tuwat office down the
street has given him this address. This time it's to
Kalypso and Horse he's explaining.
Joschka is browsing through the latest copy of the
Besetzer Post. They're all slightly stoned - with the
exception of Kalypso.
Merton pours them some more of the duty-free
Cointreau he picked up transiting East Germany.
"Are there many occupations in England?" Kalypso
asks.
Merton is from Brixton.
"Squats. Yes. The peak was a few years ago but it's
picking up again now. People tend to keep quiet about
it. They don't hang banners out the windows
advertising the fact. It's not so openly political as
here. People do it mainly to get a roof over their
143
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
heads, but that's pretty political, I guess.”
"That's the reason 1 did it," she says. "To get a roof
over mine and Froschchen's head."
"Froschchen?"
"My small daughter."
Merton nods. Culture shock and hitching from
London, with a quick stopover in Amsterdam, had
played havoc with his biorhythms. But since he's been
here things have simply fallen into place. All part of
the divine plan, no doubt.
The Beethoven Ninth track comes on.
"1 thought it'd be more or less like the London
scene,” Horse informs him.
"What's the main difference?"
"The attitude really, 1 suppose,” Horse says, rolling
another joint from the freshly steam-dried home¬
grown. "Take this!" He indicates the pile of grass.
"People here seem more to regard it as their right to
smoke the stuff. They do it openly, more up front, not
behind the bike shed like naughty boys - or girls. Like
the way it is in Dublin. But it's other things too. Like
the other day when the local gutter press started going
on about how the squatters were being financed from
Moscow - you know, the usual shite - a gang of them
went down to the local Soviet Consulate or whatever
they have here and demanded that they be given all
these roubles they were supposed to be getting -
creating a bit of an international incident. They got
fuck all roubles, but it was a good laugh!"
He lets out one of his long loud laughs before going
on.
"Seriously though, 1 spent some time in a squat in
Camden last summer and the apathy there was fucking
144
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
chronic. Here, when the pigs evict a house there's a
fucking riot. It makes the bastards think twice. But
then the laws here are different. The cops here can
more or less evict you whenever they feel like it.
There's no fucking around wasting time going getting
eviction orders and that shite. If they want to search a
place they don't even need a warrant. Bit like in
Ireland. Which explains why there's fuck all squatting
there. That's my impression anyway."
Merton notices that the white kitchen wall is covered
with graffiti: German, English, French, other
European languages he doesn't recognise - and even
some that looks like Chinese or Japanese.
"The best squatting - on a large scale - I've come
across is in Denmark, at Christiana," he says.
"Yes, I have heard about that," Joschka says,
suddenly interested.
"It's big," Merton says. "They call it a Free Town,
which it is in a way. It's an old naval base right in the
middle of Copenhagen. People moved in there in the
early 70s and it's been going strong ever since. A
good few hundred people live there all year round.
They have all sorts of things: a bicycle factory run as
a collective that actually builds bicycles more or less
from scratch, a bakery, an alternative health centre, a
communal sauna, a candle factory, a theatre, a place
where they restore and build wood stoves, a workshop
where you can build your own windmill and the
biggest hash market in Europe. They even have some
farmland. Last time I was there I saw this woman
taking a shower in the altogether ...”
"The altogether?" Joschka asks.
" ... in the nude, naked,” Merton explains, "right out
145
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
in the open, on the street - if you can call it a street,
there're no cars. And nobody hassled her and she
knew nobody would. That's pretty civilised in my
book. Know what I mean, like?"
"From what 1 heard," Horse says, "it can be a
fucking heavy place too."
Merton's a few years older than them and wears his
long hair in a ponytail. He's wondering if they're
thinking he's a sentimental old hippy.
"It can be. But mainly around the hash market.
That's just inside the entrance and it's only a fraction
of the total area. Once you get beyond that, it's fine. A
lot of the heaviness has to do with smack coming into
the place recently."
"Smack?" Joschka asks.
"Heroin, junk," Merton says. "Where there's an
overworld there's an underworld. You can't really get
rid of it, all you can do is contain it. Last I heard they
were trying to get the heroin dealers out of the place.
I'm sure you have it here in some of the houses too -
it's inevitable if you live outside the law in this way.
Squats, by their very nature, are refuges for all sorts
of people."
"That is what happened to the AJZ, the autonomous
youth centre in Zurich," Joschka adds. "After
spending a year fighting the police on the streets to
keep it open, the people there decided to close it down
themselves. There was too much heroin, too many
junkies making everything kaput. It would not
surprise me if the state had something to do with it. I
have read that that kind of thing - putting heroin into a
scene to destroy it - has been done in Italy and in
America.”
146
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Nah," Horse shakes his head, and takes a first toke
on the joint. "No need to. People like smack and it'll
turn up whenever the law isn't around. You're too
paranoid. Smack's just a scapegoat. Make the box
illegal and the norms would be out there mugging
pensioners to get their nightly fix of Coronation
Street. It's not the state that's strong, it's the people
that are weak.”
"You underestimate the amount of evil people there
are in the world," Kalypso said quietly, "hidden away
in positions of power."
"Evil. Good,” Horse says. "Out-dated concepts. Just
like optimism and pessimism. People just occupy
different head spaces."
Merton is interested in how the squatting in Berlin
started.
"Read this," Horse hands him a copy of the
Magazine. The cover is a drawing of a fag-smoking
Berlin bear in a dirty mac flashing, his genitals
blacked out. "There's an interview on the centre
spread that's fairly informative - if you read between
the lines."
"It started last November,” Joschka says. "A prisoner
support group from Libertares Forum, a kind of
anarchist group, occupied the Besetzer-Eck - that's a
house in another part of Kreuzberg - so that people
coming out of prison would have somewhere to go.
They did it during a demonstration - they went into
the house and put banners up while the demonstration
was passing. The first fighting with the police was in
December. They were totally confused at first, about
the whole situation. That was obvious from just
listening to their radio. After that the movement really
147
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
took off."
"This has been a special summer,” Kalypso
elaborates. "Last year there was nothing - no squatted
houses, no demos, no riots."
"Yeah," Joschka agrees. "The air around here has
never been freer."
Merton nods. Maybe the fact that the city is
surrounded by the Wall means that energy doesn't
become as dissipated as it does in London.
Kalypso and Tina are on the roof. The afternoon sun
is baking. Tina has taken refuge in the shade of the
chimney stack.
"Deciding to have Froschchen was such a long-term
commitment,” Kalypso is saying, her light summer
shorts draping her eyes from the sun, "that 1 had to
really think about my priorities.”
Tina always has to think for a second when Kalypso
says 'Froschchen' rather than 'my baby' or 'my child'.
For her a baby is a baby like any other, nameless. She
looks again at Kalypso's tanned nursing breasts.
"It put things into a different perspective for me,"
Kalypso goes on. "1 left school at sixteen and my
family is old Berlin working class. My father died
when I was a kid and my mother worked behind a bar
in a grotty Kneipe for years. When I left home I spent
a lot of time pissing around, not knowing where I was
going. Some of the scenes 1 got involved in were
fairly kaput. Then one bright day I found out I was
going to be a single unemployed mother - every
social worker's wet dream - and woke up. 1 never
really even thought about an abortion. If I was going
to rear Froschchen and have a future 1 had to get
148
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
things together quickly and develop the habit of
keeping myself together. In fact, I first became
involved in this political stuff when I was pregnant."
Tina feels that she's too together, too much a child
of the post-war Federal Republic middle-class
Wirtschaftswunder, too shaped by the certainties and
smugness of the Catholic village where she grew up.
She doesn't seem to have that capacity for living in
the moment she sees in Ursula and Justine - and
Horse.
And Kalypso does appear bien dans sa peau 64 - as
Justine would put it. Having Froschchen certainly has
something to do with it. But the idea of a woman
being fulfilled by a child ...
In the distance, on the Other Side, the revolving orb
on the top of the East Berlin television tower glitters
in the sun. The outline of the cross the sun's reflection
inadvertently makes on it is one of those standing
anti-DDR jokes. And, like most of them, not that
funny.
She begins to roll a cigarette.
"How come you moved into this house?" Kalypso
asks.
Tina tells her, more or less. Going into why she had
left the uni sounds hollow.
"Sometimes I think the politics of this whole thing are
a bit dubious," Kalypso says. "Like the Chamissoplatz
riot. I mean, was that really necessary? A lot of macho
posing if you ask me. On both sides. Getting a place to
live and all that is fine and good, but there's a lot of
other stuff that strikes me as being ... patriarchal shit?"
Literally: 'well in one's skin', French.
149
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
Down in the courtyard a conversation is taking place.
They can hear each word crystal clear as it echoes
upwards.
Horse is slouched in one of the armchairs, smoking the
last of the home-grown. Ancient images of white
Russian snow and grey armies pummelling each other
mercilessly are flashing across the TV screen to the
tune of the UB40 tape in the cassette player. He
guesses it's an East German channel. West German TV
doesn't seem to have the same propensity for
displaying the embarrassing past. "And TV is called
escaping from reality," he mutters to himself.
The knock on the door ignites a familiar flash of
paranoia.
But it's only Wilde.
"Just passing and 1 thought I'd drop in," he says,
easing himself into one of the armchairs.
"How are things?” Horse asks.
"Been involved in getting a few things organised
for Tuwat."
"Any particular wishes in the tea department?
We've got that green Gun Powder stuff. Scouts
honour, I won't spike it."
"Dockers'. Strong, milk and two sugar."
"When I makes tee I makes tee - and when I makes
water I makes water. As Mother Joyce would say."
Horse finds some Aldi teabags.
"I've been considering heading back to the old sod,"
he says. It's something he's been thinking about but
hasn't mentioned to anyone. "Mother fucking Ireland
and all that."
"Any particular reason?"
150
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
"Boredom maybe. It's hard to get involved in things
when you've keine Deutsch. People get tired of
talking to me in English all the time. Not that 1
blame them. 1,65
"You could learn German."
"Not motivated enough. Heard you got beaten up a
while back!"
"Heard something similar about you," Wilde
replies.
Horse made one of his that's-life faces.
"Occupational hazard, 1 suppose"' Wilde shrugs.
"Maybe I’m getting too old for the game.”
"Or your luck's running out," Horse suggests. "It
scared the fucking shit out of me. Violence is not all
it's made out to be. If that cop had aimed a few
inches higher I'd have ended up with a cracked
skull."
"Maybe I've lost my nerve," Wilde adds.
"Nature of fear, isn't it! And that's what they want
to do basically. Scare the living daylights out of you!"
"Makes you think though," Wilde said.
"Not if they crack your skull.”
"Oh, just about the whole point of taking them on
like that - physically, I mean. A lot of people have
been hurt, most of them people who were just
standing around, and far more of us than them. And
next month is not going to be a picnic either, what
with these evictions coming up and Mister Haig
coming to pay us a visit."
"You don't really believe in the innocent civilians
lark, do you?" says Horse. "People should have
65 keine Deutsch - no German.
151
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
enough cop by now to realise that if they hang around
the place while there's a riot going on, they're not
innocent bystanders, they're water for the fish."
"That's what Napoleon Bonaparte Lummer says."
"And he's right."
"It's not as simple as that."
Horse decides not to argue the point. He's been
having too many pointless arguments lately.
"And what have you being organising for the
revolutionette?"
"Tuwat?"
"What else?"
"An exhibition to be shown in the Chamisso Galerie
and later in the KuKuCK. And a series of discussions
about prisons to be held in the Tenants Centre. We're
trying to get a film from West Germany on El
Salvador for the Frontkino."
Horse nods, impressed.
"You been one of these people handing out leaflets
inviting people to free high German teas in the
exclusive Kempenskis on the Ku'damn?"
"Afraid not!"
Wilde's gradually getting to like this guy. But he has
to get a move on.
"Thanks for the dockers'."
"The pleasure's mine, sir."
152
15
At Platz der Luftbriicke the multicoloured crowd is
gathering once again. This time in front of USAF
Templehof. The monumental relic of Nazi splendour,
Leggo-like, towers above the banners and the flags -
the red and the black and all the other colours of the
rainbow. The usual crazy crowd, though there are
more in tattered black leather jackets today - despite
the heat. And, of course, the Bullen are there too,
sweating in their olive-green overalls and plastic
helmets, as impatient as anyone else for things to get
going.
Which it does, suddenly. First, in dribs and drabs,
then in a torrent, down Mehringdamn, towards
YorckstraBe, the route we've trodden so many times in
joyous and defiant pilgrimage, the music blaring.
without a break for breath
It's hot. A day to wander naked in the sun, one or
two people think at same time. So off they come, the
black drainpipe trousers, the T-shirts and leather
jackets - and male vultures in the form of press
photographers close in on the stripping Punks. All
those tits and bums - for free - in broad daylight - on
the public street - are positively irresistible.
One of the Punk girls gives them the finger.
"Piss off you fucking arseholes!" she screams.
They snap that too. A naked sixteen-year-old telling
them to fuck off is front-page stuff.
She'd like to shove their expensive equipment up their
fucking arses and down the throats of their leering
153
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
cocker-spaniel gobs. But fuck them, they're not worth
the fucking bother.
history is being made
es geht voran!
The urge to strip off spreads, descends at random.
Two guys draw anarchist 'A's and Besetzer signs on
each other's buttocks with a felt-tip marker, show their
arses to the cameras and cause another flurry of free
press activity. This time the taz photographer is on the
job too, painfully aware that he must look like one of
the vultures - and for a moment wonders if he is one of
them.
Left at Mehringdamn and then on to good old
Yorks traBe.
And leading the way, walkie-talkie in hand, is your
friendly neighbourhood Bulle, smiling, bearded,
keeping in touch with Zentrale. And enjoying himself
too by the look of it.
A few bangers go off here and there. But the sounds
of war go against the grain today and are cursed away.
A row of Bullen, forever reminiscent of Roman
Legionaries, standing guard outside the Social Welfare
Office, are surrounded by dancing naked barbarians.
Click, click go the cameras and more than a couple of
their stony faces are forced to melt into boyish grins.
Oh, if only all human severity could be made to melt
into smiles like that, even embarrassed ones. A dream
to be sure but today's as much a day of dreams as any
day will ever be, nicht wahr! A day on which latter-day
barbarians dance naked around latter-day legionaries. 6 ’
history is being made
es geht voran!
One prancing happy barbarian, naked except for a
66 nicht wahr - is that not true?
154
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
ski-mask over his hairy head, leather jacket and jeans
stuffed in a plastic bag from Aldi's, gym shoes still on
though, puts his arm around the neighbourhood Bulle
with the walkie-talkie. The cameras home in. The Bulle
smiles. Well, even us Polizisten have to smile
sometimes, and well it sure beats us beating the shit out
of each other, even if my colleagues will never let me
live this down.
space labs are falling on islands
Two guys, their pricks tied together with a necktie
from God knows where, dance arm in arm down the
avenue.
forgetfulness is spreading
The invisible spectre of Carlos Castaneda's Don
Juan's Death whispers a reminder of his existence into
Our Hero's left ear. He hops onto the grass verge and
• p « 67
starts to strip off.
"Come on, liberate yourself," he calls to Horse.
Horse shakes his head and laughs.
es geht voran!
As the human river of colour and music flows by,
Our Hero struggles with his denims, T-shirt and skid-
marked underpants and wraps them up in his leather
jacket.
mountains are exploding
They plunge into the river again.
Carlos Castaneda (1925-1998), American author,
wrote a series of books featuring a Mexican Yaqui
Shaman called Don Juan (possibly fictional). One
of Don Juan's teachings was that one's Death was
one's ally and should be consulted before all
decisions. The books also describe hallucinogenic
experiences induced by peyote and various
mushrooms, as well as describing methods to
induce and control lucid dreams.
155
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
the president is guilty
Up ahead the great iron echo chambers, the railway
bridges of YorckstraBe loom.
"That’s it, fellow human beings, liberate yourselves,"
Helga Goetze cries, sandwiched between her
placards. 68
The first human wave surges under the cast-iron
girders, whooping and howling, playing urban
Indians, followed by the second wave and the next
and the next, heading towards Potsdamer StraBe.
es geht voran!
On a balcony some Teds 69 - caught in a time warp -
amuse themselves with obscene gestures at the
pretentious fucking masses passing below, but nobody
takes any particular notice of them.
grey b-film heroes
are about to rule the world
A flashy white sports car, its polished affluence
gleaming, is set on by a gang of Punks armed with
spray cans and intent on anti-social no-future devilry.
They draw anarchist 'A's all over it and write
SCHEIBAUTO on the bonnet. 70
es geht voran!
"Tut tut," titters another sort of subversive: one
plastered in mascara, wearing a leather jacket and,
from the waist down, black suspenders and black
nylons on his shaved and shapely legs, balancing
Helga Sophia Goetze (1922-2008), German artist,
poet and political activist. Some of her work can
be seen at www.helga-goetze.de.
69 Teddy Boys - British 1950's subculture, typified by
young men wearing clothes partly inspired by
Edwardian dandies.
10 SCHEIftAUTO - Shit car.
156
ANARCHY IN A COLD WAR
precariously on a pair of pink stilettos - one of the
boys from Tuntenhaus playing his role to a tee. 71
es geht voran!
Click. Justine captures the image. But she thinks
twice about snapping the Punks. They're not wearing
masks and might not appreciate her photographic
engagee. Instead she turns to the three Anatolians,
grey suited, moustached and bellied, standing in front
of a kebab takeaway watching the mad Deutsche
world pass by.
"What, are you protesting against?" a well-meaning
citizen asks a mild-looking Punk.
"Against everything," she replies smiling.
"Everything!"
71 Tuntenhaus - queer house.
157
Postscript
On September 15 Alexander Haig, the US
Secretary of State, visited Berlin and spoke
to the Senate. About 80,000 people
demonstrated against his presence and there
was fierce rioting. On September 22 the nine
houses were evicted. While Innensenator Lummer
was giving a post-eviction victory press
conference and having himself photographed on
the balcony of one of the evicted houses, a
group of people gathered outside to protest.
The police chased the crowd onto the busy
Potsdamer Strafle where a young West German,
the nineteen year-old Claus-Jurgen Rattay, was
hit by a bus and dragged along the street and
killed. This was followed by all-night rioting
and for several days the spot where he died
became a place of pilgrimage, a place to put
flowers.
'Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at
any moment. Don Quixote is always at my side ... Don
Quixote is the best book of political theory.'
- Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, 2001
Some weapons:
Anarchism : A History Of Libertarian Ideas
and Movements, George Woodcock
A PDF of this book is available here:
http://libcom.org/library
Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Ward
Down Wind of Eden, Tom Chektout, Hooligan Press 1988
Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin
ebook at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341
The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
ebook at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23428
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kropotkin
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber
PDF version available here:
http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles.html
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia
Squatting in West Berlin, Hooligan Press, 1987
The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_under_Socialism
ebook at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1017
Rick Roderick's a psychological exposition for
upbuilding and awakening, 3 courses
on historical developments within Western philosophy
from a fairly anarchist perspective.
All 24 video-lectures be downloaded here:
http://rickroderick.org
Voltairine de Cleyre, her poetry and essays
http://voltairine.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre
Wikipedia articles on Anarchism and Squatting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting
Also from Hooligan Press/Cambria Books
DOC CHAOS: The Chernobyl Effect &
The Last Laugh by David Thorpe
Inside a nuclear reactor, no one can hear
you scream - with pleasure.
"DOC CHAOS is one of the most exciting
and refreshing pieces of graphic literature I've
seen in a long time." - Alan Moore.
Doc Chaos, the scientific prodigy who sold
the promise of nuclear power to the most
gullible, power-mad people in the world -
politicians - did so not just because he likes
seeing humanity "trip on its own banana
skins" (Graeme Basset), but for a much
darker, more erotic reason... to reach the ultimate climax.
This new edition of the ground-breaking novella by David Thorpe, author
of the award-winning novel Hybrids, contains 12 illustrations by prominent
stars of the comics art world: Simon Bisley ~ Brian Bolland ~ Brett Ewins
~ Duncan Fegredo ~ Rian Hughes ~ Lin jammed: ~ Pete Mastin ~ Dave
McKean ~ Savage Pencil ~ Ed Pinsent ~ Bryan Talbot.
It also contains a new short story, The Last Laugh, culminating the Doc
Chaos narrative at the coming apocalypse, and a new Afterword by the
Author, which sets the two pieces in their creative context.
DOC CHAOS takes the literary genealogy of doctors Frankenstein,
Faustroll and Benway into the nuclear age and beyond. A love story, that
makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like kindergarten games ...
"No one could be fully prepared for DOC CHAOS. This is a comedy of
terrors." - Don Watson, NME.
"A hugely entertaining book, full of humour, satire, and an appealing,
idiosyncratic perception of the way things are." - Dak Luciano, the
Comics Jou rnal.
"The creators of DOC CHAOS face up to the unbridled crap which is
threatening our existence. DOC CHAOS hopes the forces of authority will
slip on their own banana skins. Fast-moving and funny."
- Graeme Basset, Infinity.
Price: £1.84. Available on Amazon for the Kindle at
at www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008PYLRXM/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb or at
www.cambriabooks.co.uk/doc-chaos-the-chernobyl-effect-the-last-laugh.
LLYFRAU
CAMBRIA
west Berlin, 1981
a city surrounded toy a wall, razor wire
and machine gun posts.
within this capitalist enclave lies much
that is familiar and much that is not.
the nuclear armed missiles are waiting
in their silos.
there is no internet, perhaps NO FUTURE,
reality? sur-reality? or hyper-reality?
then there are the squatters,
and the police...
a novel of Berlin,
living with the Bomto,
Punk, protest and
alternatives.
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